Trompe L'oeil
by sodakey
Summary: In Breckenridge, Colorado, Reid sees Gideon for the first time since Gideon left the BAU. Gideon doesn't see Reid. Reid. Team. Case fic. Gen.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer:_ Not mine

_Basics:_ Takes place somewhere in season _four_ (good call, Sabakuno Temari, and thanks). Somewhere in there. The story assumes you are already familiar with the show and characters. No beta (feel free to point out typos. I don't mind). And, sorry for the weird section breaks. For the style of this, I needed something less obtrusive than a line, and this site doesn't give you a ton to work with.

* * *

**Trompe L'oeil**

* * *

_Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one._

Albert Einstein

\

In Breckenridge, Colorado, Reid sees Gideon for the first time since Gideon left the BAU. Gideon doesn't see Reid.

\

"I want to find this one before the local media does," Hotch says when they arrive, sun shining on the severe darkness of his hair as he looks down towards the river walk. "This is the first time we've been ahead of him and I want to keep it that way."

It's a resort town, generally attracting skiers and snowboarders, but it's summer, and the current population is a mixture of mountain bikers and trail hikers, with a few kayakers thrown into the mix. The team is not expecting to apprehend anyone here and they are not wearing their FBI flack jackets. They are not trying to stand out. They are not trying to be subtle either.

The locals are curious but impassive as the team works their way through, walking in and out of bookstores and coffee shops, checking for fliers left by a killer.

If they do find it, it will be the seventh. The seventh sheet of legal-sized, cream-colored, cotton-fiber paper with a graphic sepia-toned drawing of a woman at rest. The drawing will bear near photographic resemblance to the most recent body, and the words "Where will I be next?" will be printed across the top of it. The question has headlined newspapers in towns across four different states, along with stories about the victims—raped, drugged, and left for dead.

The flier shouldn't be hard to find. The geographic profile has led them here. Reid is eighty-six percent sure of its accuracy. There should be no surprises.

\

They split up to cover ground more quickly and Reid is focused, multitasking in his head as he searches. Recalculating the probabilities of where the next victim will disappear from and going back over their initial profile.

He is walking out of his second coffee shop when he sees him. And there's no mistaking it. It's Gideon. Across the street and down a block, but still Gideon. He is wearing jeans and one of those pullover sweatshirts with the half zipper in front, keys dangling in his hand as he rounds a vehicle with an easy stride.

He doesn't see Reid.

It's a startling, surreal feeling. Reid thought he'd forgiven Gideon. He thought he'd understood what Gideon had done, and why he'd done it, and been at peace with it. But seeing him now turns Reid instantly rigid and it's like walking into his father's workplace all over again. He opens his mouth and no words come out. A tingling sensation has started in his lips. A cold feeling is leaching inward, from his skin to his core, and none of his limbs are responding. The coffee cup he's carrying slips from his fingers and strikes the sidewalk as though in slow motion.

Then he blinks and Gideon is gone.

\

"Come on, kid, come on. Look at me. Look at me."

Reid looks and sees frowned eyebrows and worried eyes. Morgan's face is astonishingly close. "Morgan," he says stupidly. He doesn't think Morgan was with him a second ago, but he suddenly can't remember. Did Morgan see Gideon? He must have, if he was standing here, he must have.

"Reid?" says Morgan, breathing out, a heavily relieved sound. "Kid," he says deeply. "You were starting to scare the hell out of me."

Confusion creeps into the edge of Reid's mind. Morgan's hands are gripping his shoulders, too tightly, fingers digging darkly into his shirt and skin, like at any moment they will break through the surface and get tangled in sinew. There is panic in Morgan's grip and he is not letting go. "Morgan," Reid says again. Blood is pushing sluggishly through his neck, like too much is trying to get into his head at once.

"You with me now?"

Trying to swallow, Reid nods.

"Okay," Morgan responds, lessening the pressure. "Okay, good. How about we sit down? Hotch is on his way." He prods gently and Reid moves. There is a low-slung, ornate bench down a few feet from them, set facing the street. It's warm from the sun.

"Hotch?" Reid asks, curling his fingers inward as he sits. He feels weird, kind of numb.

Morgan stays standing. "Hotch," he confirms. He keeps one hand on Reid's shoulder while the other pulls his phone and presses something on the keypad. "We're going to get you to a hospital."

That sends Reid's nerves into action, loosening his brain and blood flow with a jolt. "What?"

Morgan looks at him but doesn't answer, speaking instead into his phone. "Hotch, it's Morgan. He's responding."

Hotch's voice hums back, low and indecipherable, before Morgan hangs up.

Reid is struggling to process information and get his words to work all at once. He touches one hand to the air between himself and his teammate and tries to explain. "Gideon," he stammers, "I just didn't expect to see him."

Morgan pauses his movements, a quizzical expression on his face. He pockets his phone watchfully and moves down to Reid's eye level. "Gideon?" he asks and Reid feels a draw from the hold on his sweater vest.

"Yeah. Gideon. I saw him, and it just… it just startled me. I don't need a hospital."

"Reid," Morgan says cautiously. He looks over his shoulder briefly then slides his hand down to Reid's bicep. "There's no Gideon."

"No," says Reid. "He was across the street. I… I saw him, and it startled me."

Slowly, Morgan moves his head back and forth. "You were unresponsive for almost five minutes. And that's _after_ I came up to you. I have no idea how long you'd been standing there before I showed up. I was practically shouting your name at you and it didn't even register. That's not being startled, Reid. That's something else. Hotch will be here in a minute. We're just going to take you in and get you checked out. That's all."

An absence seizure. Petit mal. Reid recognizes what Morgan is describing, but it has to be a mistake. Five minutes? "No," he says. He's got a hand on Morgan's wrist. "I was just… I'm fine." But the serious doubt in Morgan's eyes puts a tornado of fear into his chest. His breaths are coming quicker and he tries purposefully to slow them down. "I'm fine."

The SUV with Hotch pulls up to the curb.

"It's okay," says Morgan, voice gentle. "Come on." With a careful tug, he pulls Reid to his feet. Hotch is exiting the vehicle and walking towards them with a faux-calm expression.

"Hotch, I'm fine," Reid starts to say, but the words come out a little slurred and suddenly, for no reason he can pinpoint, he remembers his coffee. He digs his feet into the ground and looks down the sidewalk to where his cup is lying toppled on its side. "Morgan," he says forcefully. His mouth is tingling. His fingers feel numb. A phantom sensation of pressure sits heavy on his breastbone.

"Reid?" says Hotch.

"My coffee," he explains and sees the world begin to sway. A buzzing sound fills his ears and the sensation of a television gone fuzzy hits the back of his skull.

"Morgan, catch him," he hears next. And though his teammates' faces are nearly right in front of him, they already sound like they are miles away.

* * *

tbc


	2. Chapter 2

**Part 2**

* * *

They end up not having to intubate, but Hotch can tell it's a close call.

The paramedic smiles encouragingly as he explains that the anticonvulsants are working, and it sounds like it should be good news but it doesn't feel like it. Hotch wonders momentarily why he didn't let Morgan do this instead. Reid's skin is too cold. His breathing too loud.

As they unload from the ambulance into the bay, Hotch trails a few steps after but lets Reid's wrist be pulled away from him. In the wake, he presses his suddenly empty hand up to his forehead.

Within moments he's standing alone. The rush of sound that'd been omnipresent just seconds before fades to echoes. The silence leaves him feeling dizzy. Abruptly, he wants to call Jack. He wants to hear his son's voice and know he's okay. The desire is as sharp as it is illogical.

Touching fingers to his phone, he calls Rossi instead.

\

The copper tang of rust sits deep in the back of Morgan's throat. He doesn't know where it came from but he can't seem to swallow it down. JJ is across from him, sitting stiffly on a dark wood bench that should look out of place in the hospital corridor but doesn't. "We should tell Garcia," she says. Her voice is even, but loose threads flutter away from it, wisping against the silence they've been entertaining.

Morgan tries to clear his throat. "Better to tell her when we actually know something," he says. "She can keep doing what she's doing… for a little longer." He is thinking of Reid's second seizure and how he'd nearly gashed the side of his head on the sidewalk as he'd gone down, and how hard it'd been to catch him even though he'd been standing right _there_.

He's thinking he doesn't want Garcia imagining it. Not yet.

And Gideon. He's thinking of Jason Gideon. Of all the things for Reid to see…

JJ nods.

Another five minutes go by before she speaks again. "I can't believe this happened," she says. "This case… I thought we'd finally caught a break."

The air turns sluggishly in the room, over air-conditioned for their current elevation. Morgan wraps fingers around his biceps and feels the compulsion to cross the hall, put his hand on JJ's shoulder, but he can't seem to make himself move.

\

There is a quiet click-snap of metal and the double doors down past the waiting room and its few inhabitants open to reveal Hotch. He beckons them over with a frown. "Toxicology came back," he explains, handing JJ a piece of paper. "Lidocaine. It was in his coffee. Enough to kill three people."

"Is he?" JJ starts to ask.

"He's still unconscious," Hotch answers. "But we should know more soon. He's lucky he didn't drink more than he already had."

"Lidocaine—that's what the unsub's been injecting in his victims," says JJ. "He did this? He was there?"

"And he knew we'd be there too," Morgan interjects. Tightening a fist, he taps the wall, trying to keep the sudden surge of anger in check. "No way was Reid chosen as a random victim. The unsub was waiting, Hotch. He knew we'd be checking Breckenridge, so he waited. We thought we'd pulled a step ahead but he's already on the next lap. He's playing with us."

Worry lines are working the corners of Hotch's eyes, and he's not wearing his suit jacket, but he still seems impeccably put together, standing with a steadiness Morgan is grateful for, even when he knows half of it is an illusion. "He's also taking more risks," Hotch says. "We got too close, so he made a bold move, both to prove to himself that he's smarter than us and to increase the thrill of the attention he'd get from his actions. But if he's changing his routine and going off script, he's going to make a mistake."

"And he's going to escalate," adds Morgan.

"In which case, he could devolve quickly," agrees Hotch. "JJ, I want you to coordinate with local media across the state. He's going to take another victim soon and he's going to break pattern so we need the press release to expand to the entire state of Colorado. Share the profile; let people know what we're looking for. This guy is charming but able to blend in with the crowd. We need as many identifiers out there as possible."

"What if he leaves the state?" she asks.

"I don't think he will, but it's possible. We'll cross that bridge if we come to it. And, JJ, I don't want anything in the press about Reid. The unsub gets no attention for what he did to him. Understand?"

"Absolutely."

"Morgan, call Garcia," Hotch continues. "Rossi and Prentiss are helping the local police process the scene, but we need background on the coffee shop's employees. Anything she can find."

"Got it." Morgan is already pulling out his phone.

JJ tucks hair behind her ear and starts to move away.

"JJ," calls Morgan.

The fluorescent lights pale the color of her hair as she turns around.

"We'll call you if anything changes," he says. "Anything. I promise."

She nods, closes her lips, and moves out the door.

\

"You've reached the blessed Oracle of Delphi, center of the universe. What prophetic insight might your day require?"

"Baby girl," Morgan breathes.

"Oh, no," Garcia says quietly. "Derek, I hate that tone of voice. It always means something bad. I am having a good day today, I do not want to hear anything bad."

Morgan waits. He rubs a hand behind his head and looks down at the tiled floor.

"Okay. Tell me. How bad?"

"It's Reid," he says.

* * *

tbc


	3. Chapter 3

**Part 3**

* * *

Resort towns. Low risk victims. Organized. Highly educated. Highly intelligent. An artist who sees poetry in what he does. Who puts time into his victims. Into placing their bodies and not leaving evidence. Who puts time into considering what the police will do. Time enough to wait in a coffee shop for an agent to come looking.

Sending a message. Playing a game.

_I'm smarter than you, and I'm not going to stop. Where will I be next?_

Emily's head is raging. Too many nights of too little sleep is winning the battle against determination. In a way, it feels like they're all losing. The profile is detailed, but the gaps are doing them in.

Pressing a pin into the copy of the latest flier, she steps back and stares. The crime scene photographs of dead girls and the drawn images from the fliers give the evidence board a paradoxically living quality. Like it is watching her in return. Like the unsub himself is watching, waiting for evidence of their grief.

_You didn't kill him,_ she wants to tell it. _He's not dead_.

The lines on the latest drawing seem clearer than the rest. A delicate increase in detail that tells Prentiss the unsub gave it more attention than the others. Though the eyes are closed, and the body is currently residing in a morgue, the woman looks almost alive. Black hair. Pale skin. Snow White waiting for someone to just bring her back to life.

The sepia tones give the picture an idyllic feel. Like memory.

Emily sighs, runs a finger down her hairline and closes her eyes.

"The employees from the coffee shop are waiting to be interviewed," Rossi says from behind her.

She turns quickly, nearly stubbing her toe. "Gah," she says, steadying herself with a hand on the table and an attempt to laugh at herself. The effort feels hollow, the whole thing like something Reid would do, and a rush of worry invades her next intake of breath, threatening to blur the lines of compartmentalization.

"Are you okay?" asks JJ, stepping in behind Rossi.

"Yeah," she answers, sitting, breathing again, dismissing the concern with a small smile, deflecting attention to the board with a wave. "He spent more time on the last drawing than the others. He's getting more bold in more ways than one."

"The artist perfecting his craft," says Rossi, looking closer at the picture. "Or his fantasy."

"You were up late last night. You should get some sleep," JJ says, not going with the deflection. "The press release is out. The police are on alert. And Morgan said he'd call if anything changes."

Prentiss shakes her head. She knows, theoretically, that staying awake is not going to help Reid, that Rossi could handle the interviews, that they'd wake her if they got any new information, but it's become like a death game of chess. They need to figure out the unsub's next three moves before he figures out theirs and she can't be asleep for that.

Rossi sets two pills and a cup of water on the table next to her hand without comment.

\

Hotch is pacing laconically across the length of the hallway. It's the most telling evidence of how he's feeling—the storm under the calm. The rectangle shape of glass in the door distorts his legs, twisting them into broken shards as he angles into the corner. Morgan spends a moment reconciling the image before pushing through and handing Hotch a cup of coffee.

"Thank you," Hotch says steadily, taking the cup, but his eyes flicker down over Morgan as if to ensure he's okay.

It's starting.

The further Reid's situation sinks in, the more they're closing ranks around each other and Morgan has the feeling it's only going to get worse. "JJ make it back to the police station okay?" he asks.

Hotch nods. He lifts the coffee up to his lips, then hesitates.

"I made it myself," Morgan explains. "And I washed the pot first. The nurses in the lounge think I'm crazy, but they humored me anyway."

"Thank you," Hotch says again, but he shakes his head a little, as if their collective paranoia should be something he's surprised by.

"Garcia is running the background," Morgan reports, easing down into the space where JJ'd been sitting. He sets his own coffee aside and palms his forehead. "She'll call Rossi and Prentiss when she has something."

"Good. Any information should help."

"Did they find the flier?"

"In the bookstore at the end of the block."

Morgan nods.

After that, silence sits restlessly between them for a while—Hotch drinking his coffee, pacing occasionally. Morgan can nearly see the case notes scrolling through Hotch's head and he tries to do the same, tries to pull the information into his memory and figure out if there's another move they can be making right now, but he can't seem to focus. A beep from the intercom, a voice from down the hall, and his thoughts all shatter.

He takes another sip of his coffee and then taps it away. He knows exactly what went into it, but it still tastes wrong.

Hotch drops his empty cup into the trash and folds his arms, leaning minutely, back to the wall. "When Reid wakes up, when he's up to it, we'll need to walk him through a cognitive interview," he says, "but the level of lidocaine he was dosed with can affect memory. His may not be as reliable as we're used to."

"You think he saw the unsub?"

"I think it's likely, yes. Whether he knows it or not is a different story."

Morgan lets that settle, then swallows and asks, "Do they expect him to?"

"To?"

"Wake up."

"They're… optimistic," Hotch says.

A thump sounds somewhere in the ceiling above, followed by a whir heralding the return of the too-cold, slow-moving air. Sitting back, Morgan sighs.

"There's no antidote for lidocaine toxicity," explains Hotch. "They can only try to treat what it's doing to his system, and so far they feel they're doing that successfully. We just have to wait. And stay hopeful."

Feeling weary, more weary than he has in a long time, Morgan nods. He holds his lips together for a second and leans forward, rubbing the knuckles of his hands together. "Before he wakes up, before we interview him," he finally says, "there's something you should know."

Hotch turns his head, waiting.

"Reid thinks he saw Gideon. Right... before."

There is a flicker, a temperate change in Hotch's eyes. Not cold. Not completely warm. It only lasts a moment, and to Morgan it feels strangely like compassion. It twists at the tucked away part of him that still misses the man, the part that understands why he left, and the part that still doesn't. For a second, he remembers how he felt when Reid told him Gideon had referred to him as a _young man he greatly respected and admired_. He remembers the sense of subtle confidence that'd settled into his bones when Gideon admitted it.

Focusing on the bleached clean linoleum under his feet, he shuts off the memory.

"Lidocaine toxicity can cause hallucinations," Hotch says simply. But he's eased himself away from the wall and set a momentary hand to his temple.

Morgan frowns. "You don't think he really saw him, do you?"

"No," answers Hotch, "but we should check, for Reid's sake. Jason's not dead and running into him is not completely unfathomable. Breckenridge _is_ the kind of town he would visit."

"It'd still be one hell of a coincidence."

"I know. And I know I asked you this before, but you didn't see anyone, did you?"

"No," Morgan answers. "Like I said, the street was practically empty when I found him. Afternoon business lull. A mom and her kid were walking together way down on the other side, and two teenage kids were coming out of a sporting goods store a few blocks down. That's it. No one fitting the profile of our unsub. And I think I would have remembered seeing Gideon, even if there was a crowd."

Hotch starts to nod when a new voice speaks. "Agent Hotchner?"

"Here," says Hotch, unfolding his arms.

Morgan gets to his feet, muscles tensing in his gut as the doctor makes his way over.

"We think he's coming out of it."

* * *

tbc


	4. Chapter 4

**Part 4**

* * *

There is a burnt sound in the air. Words and voices that make Reid think of the bright heat below a bed of simmering charcoal. White ash floating away from it, building in a brittle wind, like a reverse cascade of snow. It settles softly in his ears, rests gritty on his eyelids, and for some reason, makes him think of Hotch.

"Give him some time," a stranger's voice echoes, plowing through the heat. "Talk to him. Let him know you're here. It will help lesson the confusion."

A moment later, smooth fingers touch the top of his head, firm points of contact that spread flashes of light across his brain.

"Reid," he hears. It's a plain sound, and steady.

He can't remember where he is but he can tell he is lying down, feels almost upside down, and when he finally gets his eyes open, there are twists of bright colors, but no ash. Panic moves through him when he takes a breath and a moan eases from his throat.

"You're going to be okay," Hotch's voice says clearly. "You're in a hospital, but you're going to be fine. Reid, you're going to be okay."

\

"You handed a federal agent a cup full of poison and you don't know where it came from?" Emily asks incredulously, dropping a file on the table. Her headache has not gone away. She feels her pulse beating behind her right eye, but her face stays neutral.

The girl on the other side slumps, folding her arms across her body. "I told you, I just gave it to him," she says. "I didn't pour it." She's got black-painted fingernails, black-streaked blond hair, and too much eyeliner—subtle representations of an in-your-face attitude and an image that gives Prentiss flashbacks but shows nowhere else in the girl's demeanor.

"Then who did?" she asks. "Only two of you work behind the counter. If it wasn't you, it must have been Ian."

"And I told you, Ian wouldn't poison anyone."

"And then you refused to tell me anything more. Why?"

"I don't have anything more to tell."

Prentiss sends a patient glance towards the two-way mirror, picturing Rossi's expression on the other side before turning back to the girl. Sitting slowly, she softens her voice. "Carin, listen to me. We know you're not the criminal here. But we need you to help us so we can figure out who is."

Carin stares silently at her knees.

Prentiss starts speaking. "We know you're an English major at the University of Denver and you're a good student. You've worked in that coffee shop three summers running and while you work there, you volunteer twice a week for the Summit County Forest Support project. You got a speeding ticket last month driving down to New Mexico to visit your parents. It was the first ticket you've ever received and you were mortified. You kept it a secret because you were afraid of how they would react."

The girl flicks her gaze up, eyes wide.

Emily waits. She doesn't have to wait long.

"Did I kill him?"

"No. Agent Reid is still alive, and what happened to him was not your fault. You're a good person and you wouldn't hurt anyone on purpose. But the man who did this was in your shop. He was close enough to you to get poison into a cup he knew would be handed to a federal agent. We need to figure out how that happened. You saw him, Carin. You spoke to him. We need to know every detail so we can catch him before he hurts anyone else. Do you understand?"

Slowly, the nod comes.

"Did you pour the coffee?"

Nodding again, Carin says, "I thought I was doing something nice."

"What do you mean?"

"When he came in, he didn't look like an agent, but he had that gun on his belt, and when he described the flier he was looking for, I knew what he was talking about because I'd read about it in the news."

"It made you nervous," deduces Emily.

"Yeah. He was really nice when I asked about it, though. He made Ian promise to walk me to my car when my shift was over. And he had those rings under his eyes, like he'd been working nonstop, you know? And I thought, if anyone could use a free cup of coffee, it's him. I signaled Ian for a cup and then poured an extra. I told the agent it was on the house for law enforcement."

"An extra?"

"We brew shifts of coffee. At least… that's what we call it. When we have a new brew, the old brew becomes extra. There's usually only a few cups left, but as long as we're responsible with who we give it to, we're allowed to give cups of it on the house. We call the cups extras."

Suddenly, the door opens. Prentiss turns her head around.

Rossi has a serious expression on his face. "We need to talk," he says.

\

Reid has his head hunched forward in the angled up bed, chin strained down towards his chest even though the room keeps tipping sideways and the position makes him dizzy. He keeps feeling his arms unfold but when he tucks his chin back down to look at them, they're folded still, and he doesn't know which is the reality. He's just trying to hold himself together, but it's not working.

Morgan keeps talking him into leaning his head back. "Easy, kid," he keeps saying, touching him on the shoulder when his breathing gets too fast. "Easy."

"Where's Hotch?" Reid asks. His voice is unsteady in his own ears and he thinks he might be shivering. He knows Hotch was here and now he's gone, and he's not sure if that means something might have happened to him or not, but it feels like it.

"He's calling JJ," Morgan explains patiently, slowly, like he's already explained it once or twice.

"Is he okay?"

"He's fine," Morgan says, same slow voice.

"Where's Morgan?" Reid asks next.

Morgan goes still, eyes closing. When he opens them again, his face is carefully calm. "I'm right here, Reid. I'm right here."

"Right," Reid says, flicking his eyes away. Part of his brain tells him it's true, Morgan is here, but another part says maybe he's not, and Reid just wants to make sure. He bites his lips against asking after the others. What he's saying is wrong. He knows it's wrong. But he can't seem to stop the feeling in his chest or the thoughts in his head. "Right," he says again.

"Hey. Deep breaths now. Look at me."

Reid does, drawing air slowly.

"What you're feeling is to be expected," says Morgan, holding his gaze. "The doctor said that you'd be feeling anxious for a while. And that you might be… off in other ways."

It's a diplomatic way of saying _you might still hallucinate_, but Reid keeps listening.

"It should fade in a few hours but for right now, it's normal. So if you need to know someone's okay, you go ahead and ask, alright?"

Reid nods, but he thinks what he's feeling is so much more than anxiety, so much more than being _off_. He feels like the world is going to fall apart and he can't stop it. He keeps thinking of Bob Dylan's _My Back Pages_ and of his mom scribbling in notebooks.

_Pounced with fire on flaming roads..._

He can't get the words out of his head.

"I'm not anxious," he lies shakily, because if he admits it, that's it, everything will end. He'll end up caged, Gideon will be taken by Frank, and Strauss will kick Hotch out of the BAU. The world will burn and girls will die by the hundreds, jerking violently in the leaves until they succumb to the overdose, then, magically, be frozen in pictures.

Reid tries to swallow. His throat is slow to cooperate.

"Easy, kid," Morgan says again, hand returning to his shoulder for a moment before touching his forehead and moving his head back to the pillow. "Easy."

Morgan's voice is hypnotic. It sways with the slanting rhythm in Reid's head.

Very distinctly, he hears music playing.

He's almost certain it isn't real.

Almost.

\

When he opens his eyes again, it's hours later and he's been dreaming of Gideon. The dream lingers, like a shadow in the corner. Reid hears Gideon's voice like an echo. _I'm sorry for leaving like I did. It had nothing to do with you not being good enough._

He knows it's an illusion.

* * *

tbc


	5. Chapter 5

**Part 5**

* * *

The viewing room is dark.

Light from the two-way glass between them and the interrogation room does nothing to the surrounding shadows but make them sharper, and as Rossi stares through to the girl on the other side, he has the sensation of waiting in a movie theater. Waiting for the show to start. Waiting for the moving picture to reveal the twist in the story. But Carin Cornick is showing him only what he already knows. A mystery with no ending. Dead girls scattered throughout.

Ian Amari was the same. Rossi pictures him standing in his holding cell, awkward but easygoing, secrets all spent before he'd even entered the police station. He has a mountain of unpaid parking tickets, a crush on Cornick, and, in Rossi's opinion, an unhealthy obsession with tree canopy lichen. He's two months behind on his student loan.

"One of them has to be lying," says Rossi. His lifetime as a profiler makes the words emerge measured, less frustrated than he feels.

Prentiss sighs, flipping back over the transcript from Amari's interview. She has her back to the interrogation room, using the light to review the text. "So far their stories match but still show enough variance to account for personal viewpoints," she says.

"Then we have a problem," Rossi points out, turning his face away from the window. "The girl gave the coffee to Reid _on the house_. It was her decision. Not Amari's. Not anyone else's. What guarantee did the unsub have that she would do that? Let alone get lidocaine into the cup without anyone noticing."

"I agree, but, if they're lying…" Prentiss trails off, shaking her head.

"Then they're some of the best liars we've ever seen," Rossi finishes. "It doesn't fit. Our unsub is meticulous and detail oriented. In this scenario there are too many variables out of his control. He wanted to send us a clear message by poisoning Reid. He wouldn't have left it up to chance. So how did he do it?"

Prentiss drops the file on the table and rubs at her temples. "I think we're too tired to think about this clearly."

Rossi nods. He's about to give a wry reminder on the suggestion of sleep but the door opens before he can.

A stripe of gold light stretches over JJ as she enters. "That was Hotch," she says, holding up her cell phone. "Reid's awake."

The room is silent for a moment, the exertion of trying too hard to get ahead of their serial killer making them slow to process good news.

Finally, Emily drops her hands away from her head and says, "Thank God."

Rossi keeps his face neutral. He wishes the news was enough to make the muscles ease along his back, but he's pragmatically pessimistic and he needs more. "And?" he asks.

"And it looks like he's going to be okay," says JJ. "They don't believe he suffered any permanent damage."

They don't _believe… _

Rossi wonders. There are always repercussions. It's one of the most repeated lessons taught by existing in the BAU. But it's followed closely by _be grateful for what you have in the moment_, so he keeps his mouth closed.

"Does he remember anything?" asks Prentiss.

"We don't know yet. Hotch says he's not ready for a cognitive."

"What does that mean, exactly?" Rossi asks.

"Just that he's still dealing with side effects, but he's handling it, and Hotch doesn't want us to worry."

"So we keep looking for other leads," says Prentiss.

"No," JJ replies, diplomatically. "Not right now. I've booked us rooms in a hotel near the hospital. Morgan is staying with Reid, but Hotch is going to meet us there. He wants to go over updates and then he wants us to get some sleep."

Prentiss starts to open her mouth.

"I already spoke to the police chief," JJ forestalls, a rare authoritative expression on her face. "He's going to keep Amari and Cornick in custody for us until tomorrow. In the meantime, we're done for the night."

"Hotch is right," Rossi adds, looking at Emily. "You said yourself, we're too tired to be thinking about this clearly. Tonight, there's nothing more we can do."

JJ's eyes flicker between them. "I need to update Garcia," she says. "I'll meet you outside."

"Okay," agrees Rossi.

The door closes, quietly. Emily's face shows nothing in the wake but he speaks anyway. "You heard her," he says. "Reid's going to be okay."

She gives him a half smile. "But are we? I feel like we have no idea where to go from here. And if we're right about the unsub escalating, who's to say he won't take someone tonight? Chances are, we're going to be looking at an eighth victim tomorrow. And with Reid…" She tips her head, looking over at Rossi. "We keep saying the unsub poisoned him to show he's smarter than us. Well, right now, it feels like he is."

Rossi relates to the sentiment. He doesn't know how much they'll really sleep, but they need to try. The day has been a nightmare, but it could have ended worse. At the moment, trying is all that's left to them. "We'll catch him," he says simply. "Killers escalate and they make mistakes. This one is no different. We'll figure out what that mistake is, and we'll catch him."

Taking a deep breath, Emily nods.

For now, she's listening. After a day of failures, Rossi tallies it as a tentative success. He needs the win. There is one more challenge ahead for him tonight—getting Hotch to take his own orders—and the day has already stacked the odds against him.

\

"He's really awake?" asks Garcia.

"He's awake," confirms JJ.

"As in, he's going to be okay, awake?"

"That's what Hotch said."

"Promise?"

"Garcia."

"Right. So, I searched again, just like you asked, but… Jage, there's nothing. If anything, the unsub chose lidocaine because it isn't that hard to get and it doesn't raise a lot of red flags when you do, in cyberspace or otherwise. Most people don't consider it a particularly deadly substance. Though I tell you right now, next time I'm at the dentist, she is going to use an alternative numbing agent for my root canal because that stuff isn't coming near me ever again."

A gust of wind blows low across the parking lot, picking dirt off the ground as it goes. JJ pulls her jacket closer around her and steps farther out from the building. The warmth from the day has fled and the night is colder than she expected. Above her and to the left one of the streetlamps is flickering, buzzing loudly as it dims.

"JJ?"

"Yeah. Sorry, I'm here."

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, just, long day." She lifts a hand to rub at her face. "Sorry to make you look again. I guess I was just hoping…" she closes her mouth, breathing out. "To tell the truth, I think we're all getting a little desperate."

"Jage, it's understandable. And you know I don't mind triple checking. Anything I can do to help. Besides," Garcia's voice dips, turning furtive as it rolls forward, "it's not the most out-there search you guys have requested of me tonight."

"What do you mean?" asks JJ.

"Hotch asked… wait, did he tell you about this?"

"No, Garcia, Hotch asked you to search for something? Does he have a lead?"

"Not something. Someone."

"Who?"

"Jason Gideon."

"Gideon?" JJ frowns, standing still. The struggling streetlamp buzzes loudly in the silence, blinking out with a snap. She stares upwards then looks away, back at the building and the dim glow leaking out through the doors. "Did he say why?"

"Nope, and he was off the phone before I could ask. No update on Reid, nothing, just…"

"Did you find anything?"

"So far? Zilch. Nada. And I'm getting really tired of telling you guys that. So, start thinking up questions I can answer, really soon, okay?"

"We'll work on it," JJ says numbly.

"JJ. Why would Hotch be looking for Gideon?"

"I don't know."

"But you'll call me if you find out?"

"I'll call you," she answers. Another snap sounds behind her. Angling her head, she flicks her eyes towards the lamp. It's still blacked-out, but there are shadows moving around behind it, weaving through the bushes beyond the parking lot, swaying back and forth, creaking in the wind. That's all it is, wind and shrubs, but JJ feels an uneasy sensation spread across her shoulders.

For a second, she feels like she is being watched.

"JJ?" Garcia says seriously. "You think the unsub is going to take someone else tonight, don't you?"

Swallowing hard, JJ turns pointedly away from the bushes, and gets her mouth open. She doesn't answer the question. "Get some sleep, Garcia," she says steadily. "I know it's late there."

"With this case," Garcia says, "it's late everywhere. You know, sometimes I really hate being so far away from you guys."

JJ clears her throat. "Us too."

"Stay safe. Give Reid a hug from me."

"I will."

The connection goes silent.

The wind has died down, the bushes stand motionless, but as JJ closes her phone, the hairs on the back of her neck stand upright.

The rumble of an engine ignites loudly to her left. She whips her head towards the sound and sees Rossi in the SUV.

Sighing slowly, she heads in his direction.

* * *

tbc

* * *

So, writing Rossi... may not be my forte. Therefore, not my finest chapter.

Also, I imagine some readers may be disappointed by the lack of Reid (or Hotch or Morgan) in this section, but hopefully it wasn't too painful. It is a Reid centric fic, but it is also a team fic, and a case fic. Pacing wise, I needed the team and case fic side of the equation to take precedence here. If it was painful, my apologies. ;)


	6. Chapter 6

**Part 6**

* * *

The second victim had still been alive when she'd been found, but was dead before she reached the hospital. They hadn't been on the case yet. They were told later that her eyes had stayed closed the whole time, calm and still, like she'd just been sleeping instead of in distress. Arms crossed carefully over her chest. Just like the one before. Like all the others after.

A sign of remorse, they'd thought initially, but it never fit the rest of the profile.

Morgan keeps thinking about it. He can't get the image out of his head.

Reid is sleeping.

In the 3am light his stillness is unsettling. But it's almost worse when he's awake.

He's been gradually calmer each time his eyes open, but his face seems sunken, the lines of his bones sharper than normal, movements brittle. And he keeps looking at the walls, like he can see something about them Morgan can't. Half of him in a world Morgan can't touch.

"You should sleep, Morgan."

Angling his head, Morgan sees Reid's eyes staring steadily in his direction. Turning from the window, he says, "I've been sleeping. How 'bout you?"

There is little movement in response. A shift in Reid's eyes. The subtle expansion of his chest. "Did you know there's a Starbucks in every town the killer has been in?"

"What?" Morgan asks, matching the quiet of Reid's voice.

"He never left any of the fliers in them though. They were always someplace else."

"Reid," Morgan sighs.

"Do you think that means something?"

Leaning his hands on the bed, Morgan keeps his words gentle but puts authority into them. "Reid, I don't want you thinking about this right now."

Reid goes silent but Morgan can see his eyes shifting in the dim, looking past him at the wall. Settling a hand on his shoulder, he grips lightly. An anchor. For himself or Reid, he isn't sure, but Reid's gaze stays beyond him.

"Do you think Gideon keeps in contact with his son?" Reid whispers.

Pressure increases around Morgan's chest, air thinning as he breathes out. He doesn't want Reid thinking about that either but he can't order it away. "I don't know," he answers honestly. The words resound hollowly in the room, and are followed by more silence. But Reid isn't finished.

"Did you know lidocaine can trigger a schizophrenic episode?" he says. "Especially in those who are prone to it?"

Morgan looks down. Reid's eyes have returned to center and are watching Morgan's face.

"Which are most often _temporary_," he responds, infusing his voice with calmness he doesn't feel. "You're okay, kid. You're not schizophrenic."

Reid keeps his gaze steady a second longer, then looks past, back at the wall.

Squeezing his shoulder, Morgan closes his own eyes and tries to slow the beating of his heart.

"Morgan?" Reid says next, hesitantly, but his voice is a little louder, a little less vacant. "Can you turn the bathroom light on?"

It's been a long time since Reid's alluded to his fear of the dark, but Morgan wishes he would have thought of it first. "Yeah," he says, no teasing, and gives the kid's shoulder another squeeze.

\

The hotel lobby has an arched ceiling and a windowed roof. Square-paned glass set into raw wood frames, early morning light spreading a pattern of dull gold across the floor beneath them.

Alone in the quiet room, Hotch stands motionless, arms folded, gaze set contemplating the coffeemaker. His mind is elsewhere.

Behind him, rubber-soled shoes sound softly on the slate, stopping next to his shoulder. "Would you like me to pour you a cup?" Rossi asks, inflection wry.

Hotch turns his occupied gaze to Dave's face, then looks outward, towards the windows hovering around them and the illusionary beginnings of a beautiful day. "We'll need to go back to the coffee shop and try to stage the scene," he says. "Morgan should go. He'll be needing a break from the hospital and he might be able to offer a fresh perspective."

"Ah," says Rossi, eyes traveling, roaming to the stone table below the balustrade and the open files sitting on top of it. "Did you sleep?"

Hotch pauses. "The night was quiet," he says.

Rossi's expression settles deeper, more solemn, but his tone remains casual. "Would it be cliché if I were to say _too_ quiet?"

"Maybe," Hotch concedes, facing Dave squarely. "But you'd be right. If someone went missing last night, we haven't heard about it."

"So he's either waiting, or no one's noticed yet."

"Exactly. And the truth is, we're not likely to be informed about a potential victim until it's too late."

"_Where will I be next?_" Rossi quotes, strolling a little closer to the stack of files. "We answered his question, now he changes the answer."

"We need to take Reid through the cognitive. It may not be reliable, but his memory is the best chance of giving us a lead."

"Is he ready?"

Unfolding his arms, Hotch moves back to the table. "I hope so," he answers, setting hands on the files, focus shifting as he shuffles them back into order. He hasn't called Morgan to find out. He hopes they're both sleeping, but he doubts that's the case.

Rossi doesn't respond.

For a few seconds there is silence and a momentary simplicity of purpose. The tick of a clock grinding somewhere to Hotch's left, and the impersonality of henna-toned cardstock under his fingers. It doesn't help. He slept, but not enough, and the sensation of clear-headedness he gained is not changing the landscape like he hoped it would.

"So Reid thinks he saw Gideon," Rossi states plainly.

Hotch stops his movements and looks over.

Rossi's expression is prosaic, but nodding, he explains. "This team is respectful of keeping confidences, Hotch, but when you ask the technical analyst to do a search for a man you all spent every day with but whose name you've barely spoken since… it gets noted."

"Does everybody know?"

"It's not been in open discussion, but, yeah, I'd say likely."

Easing his posture a fraction, Hotch says, "Then you also know Jason's gone off the grid." Reaching down, gripping his briefcase off the chair, he sets it open on the table.

"And does that surprise you? The way I understand it, when Gideon left, he was running as far as he could as fast as he could. Demon. Friend. It didn't matter. It was all the same."

Sliding the files into the case, Hotch taps his fingers on the top.

Rossi steps closer. "And you're searching for him because…? You know it was a hallucination, right?"

"I know," answers Hotch. He opens his mouth to add more but has to wait a moment for the words. "Jason left a lot of confused people behind," he finally says. "Reid was one of them."

"They were close," supplies Rossi.

Not a question. Not exactly a statement.

Just an invitation to speak more and Hotch nods.

"It'd been less than eight months since Reid's abduction. He was doing better, but Jason's leaving was difficult. Reid struggled. And he's going to struggle with this." Meeting Rossi's eyes, Hotch continues, straightforward, the profiler part of his personality coming to the front. "He'll pretend it was nothing, but he'll wonder. His mind won't be settled and he'll have a hard time letting go."

"You were hoping to give him closure."

"Yes," says Hotch. The word is controlled but comes out more strongly than he intends. He's not even sure where the surge of force came from and it takes a second to settle it back. "If we could tell Reid where Jason is, it would give him something concrete. I owed it to him to at least check."

There's a stretch of silence. Hotch watches the contemplative look on Rossi's face, and waits.

"And there was no part of you that was hoping to find Gideon also? He ran this team with you. He built it with you. I know you've wondered."

"What are you saying?"

"That maybe part of you is taking what happened to Reid as the excuse to do what you've never allowed yourself to do before now…. Maybe you were hoping to put your mind at ease also."

"Maybe," Hotch says, easing back on his heels. Clearing his throat, he shakes his head. "Something about this case, Dave. I keep thinking—"

The statement is swallowed by the sound of voices on the staircase—JJ talking to Prentiss about information analysis and tip lines.

"Do we have something?" Hotch asks as they step down the landing.

Looking up from her PDA, JJ shakes her head. "Not yet, but Garcia's going over it. She'll let us know when we do."

"The unsub should know by now that what happened to Reid didn't make the paper," says Prentiss. "Getting no attention for it—if anything were to provoke him to call the tip line, that would be it."

"You're right, but I don't think he will," says Rossi. "He enjoys undermining us too much. Every time the press have found one of his drawings before we did, it fed the public hysteria, gave him more power, made us work twice as hard to deal with it, and gave the image to the public that he was two steps ahead."

Prentiss tilts her head, lips pressed thin. "It's not just an image. He is two steps ahead. The drawings being found before we got to them just guaranteed press coverage and gave him bragging rights."

"Exactly," says Rossi. "If he calls, it will be to the press, not the tip line."

"I don't know," says Prentiss. "His motivations are the same but the rules have changed. I think…" She stops moving, tilting her head the other direction, gaze fixed somewhere beyond them.

"What is it?" asks JJ.

Sending Hotch a serious look, Prentiss steps past him, moving to the reception desk and the rack of tourist pamphlets next to it. Shoving one of the leaflets to the side, she pulls out the piece of paper it'd been covering, studying it before looking out at the rest of them, eyes holding on JJ while handing the paper to Hotch.

Cotton fiber. Sepia tones. Near photographic depiction. Hotch frowns as he takes it and feels a tightening in his jaw. He looks at Rossi, then hands the drawing to JJ.

JJ takes it hesitantly, fingers stiff at the corners as her eyes scan downwards. "That's me in the… parking lot," she says, glancing up at Hotch. "At the police station."

"When?" he asks, taking the paper back and giving it to Rossi.

"Last night. I was… I was talking to Garcia on my cell phone."

"He never left town," says Rossi. "He's watching us. This is a challenge."

"And a threat," agrees Hotch.

* * *

tbc

* * *

Author Notes: I usually leave such notes at the beginning or end of the fic, but, I feel I should mention that, while I've not _recreated_ Breckenridge for my story, I have twisted it a tad to fit my needs. I am familiar with the town, and thus I should probably behave better when dancing around the realism, but I still do it. My apologies to those that this practice may offend. ;)

Thanks all for the fantastic feedback.

P.S. Is anyone else experiencing mad glitches with this site?


	7. Chapter 7

**Part 7**

* * *

The walls keep changing color.

Reid feels washed out when he looks at them, black and white, like he's in a dream and the walls are keeping all the color for themselves.

When he was a child, his mother had sometimes ranted about painted walls. Insisting the colors were wrong. Insisting that someone had come through the house during the night and changed them. Once, she'd torn sheets up, dropping them haphazardly underneath open cans of paint, then stood next to them in her nightgown, spreading green across every smooth surface with her bare hands.

He remembers the smell—fumes trapped behind shuttered glass—and the sharpness of finding her that way. Shards of broken moonlight reflected off her hands. The brittle undercurrent in his father's reaction. The sounds are there too, just more abstract. He remembers the bang and clatter of his mother sending a paint can towards his father's head, and the slamming of the front door, but the sounds are out of sequence, like the memory has been abandoned by him for so long his brain doesn't quite know how to wire it back together.

"Hotch, he's not ready for this."

Reid looks up, tracking his gaze from Hotch to Morgan and back again. "I'm okay," he says, moderating the clench of his shoulder blades.

"Reid," Morgan begins.

"I can keep going." Sitting straighter, Reid looks away from Morgan's too-compassionate face and flutters his fingers towards the tape holding down the IV. The hairs trapped underneath are itching like mad.

Hotch taps his wrist lightly and pulls it away. "Close your eyes," he instructs. "Take it slow. What else do you see?"

Reid complies, but when his lids close, the memory lingering behind them is of himself, kneeling on his mother's floor, trying to clean spilled paint from the wood. Sound waves from the slamming front door are buzzing under his bent knees. _I can't keep doing this, Diana. I can't keep cleaning up after you. _

Springing his eyes open, Reid takes a dark, hard breath. "Wouldn't this be more effective if you took me back to the scene?" he says.

Morgan sighs loudly, stepping back from the bed. Reid doesn't look at him.

Hotch shakes his head. "If we need to, we can do that later. For now, this is enough. Close your eyes."

Reid runs a finger down the bridge of his nose, tapping it against the headache pulsing under the cartilage. His eyelashes feel prickly against his skin and he has to wait for the persistence of vision to fade before trying to draw the coffee shop back into his mind. He wants to help. He needs to help. He's just not sure he can get this to work. His thoughts aren't linear. He feels ghost-like in comparison to his surroundings. Reaching for Kant's theories on the noumenal world does nothing but make his heart beat harder and he wonders if this is the panic his mother feels whenever the medications get too low.

"Go back to what you were telling me," says Hotch, voice like an anchor. "You said you saw four cork boards on the back wall. You walked towards them. Music is playing on the overhead speaker."

Slowly, it starts to return. The coffee shop's bright interior. The scuff of tile under his feet and the smell of French roast. The image shakes for a second, but holds. "I see the cork boards," he says.

"Good. Go on."

"I'm memorizing all the fliers, but the unsub's isn't there."

"Okay. Is anyone watching you besides the girl behind the counter?"

"Three elderly gentlemen are at a table to my left. They glance at me and they're talking but… I think they're talking about fishing." In his mind, sunlight is refracting through the windows, obscuring their faces. A voice is saying something about trout. Behind him, the girl working the counter is talking too.

She's asking about the flier. She's looking at his gun. Undercutting her words is a clicking sound, steady and constant.

"Someone is tapping a pen to my right," Reid tells Hotch.

"Can you see who it is?"

Tipping his head to the side, Reid tries to hone in on it. The tapping grows louder in his ears. "Two more customers are sitting at a barstool-height table near the counter on the other side of the shop. A man and a woman. I think it's one of them. But…"

"But?" prompts Morgan.

Reid licks his lips. The image skips back and forth over the woman's smile. "The woman feels… fake." He starts to lift his head, begins to open his eyes, but Hotch stops him, setting a solid hand on his shoulder. It's safe and steadying but feels too close to his skin through the papery hospital gown. It feels like if it shifts the wrong way it could break the membrane protecting his sanity.

"Fake in what way?" asks Hotch.

"I don't know." Reid swallows. "Just… fake."

"Okay. Leave that for now. Go back to the employees. Do you remember the girl handing you the coffee?"

Nodding, Reid says, "I think so. I was leaving. I'm almost to the door when the girl calls to me." Clenching his eyes tighter, he juts his chin down. The pictures are there. He can see the workers behind the counter moving their mouths, but everything they're saying is being taken over by background noise.

The tapping pen is speeding up.

Then, suddenly, everything goes silent and the images start skipping, fast forwarding without his say so, rushing through the motions before stopping abruptly on the shiny glint of sunlight reflecting off Gideon's dangled keys.

Reid feels, again, his lips start to tingle, the metallic taste back in his mouth. He feels the coffee cup slip from his hand.

"Hey, take it easy," says Morgan.

Unlocking his eyelids, Reid looks up. He gets his mouth open, but can't seem to speak. "The tapping stopped," he finally says.

"What?" asks Hotch.

Looking down at his hands, Reid tries once more to slow the images and reorder the sound. "While I was talking to the girl—before she handed me the coffee—the tapping of the pen stopped."

"Are you sure?" asks Hotch.

"No," Reid admits, shaking his head. Nothing's clear, and everything still ends on Gideon, like the screen is frozen in that moment.

"Okay. That's enough for now," says Hotch. He and Morgan trade looks. "Morgan."

Morgan nods, flicking his gaze down at Reid. "I'll go update the others," he says. "I'll be right back. Okay, Reid?"

"Yeah."

Hotch takes a deep breath after the door clicks. There is something preparatory about the sound. Something waiting. "Morgan tells me you saw Gideon," he says.

Reid feels himself go still and looks up, swallowing carefully. "He was across the street when I came out of the coffee shop."

Hotch nods, then starts to shake his head. "I had Garcia do a search, but so far—"

"That's okay," Reid says quickly, looking down, flitting his eyes back up briefly. "I was drugged. I know I probably didn't really see him."

Hotch watches for a moment, opening his mouth, then closing it. "Okay," he says, finally. Reaching out, he sets his hand once more to Reid's shoulder, over that thin membrane of sanity, then lets go, following Morgan out the door.

\

Tension is waiting in the hallway when Hotch steps into it. Extra vigilance hidden in casual stances. Rossi has his hands in his pockets. Across the hallway, JJ is holding her phone. Facing the other direction, Prentiss has the case file in her hands. Morgan is standing next to her with a shoulder to the wall.

The way they're angled, they haven't left a vantage point uncovered.

"We just got the call," explains JJ, looking in Hotch's direction. "There's another girl missing."

"Where?" says Hotch.

"The Douglas Lodge. It's next door to where we stayed last night. A woman went down the hallway to get some ice. Her sister said she never came back. The police chief is over there now. He's waiting for us."

"Did we get anything off the security cameras at our hotel?"

"Nothing," says Prentiss, turning farther to face him. "They were disconnected shortly before 5am, and the desk clerk was asleep. He doesn't remember seeing anyone. Garcia is checking at the Douglas. So far, nothing."

"Okay," Hotch sighs. They've been waiting for this, but something feels off. "We need to investigate the new disappearance, but we also need to go back to the coffee shop and I don't want us spread too thin. We have to assume he's still watching."

Rossi shifts subtly, expression too neutral. Hotch looks at him. "What are you thinking?" he prompts.

"Us," says Rossi. "He's still watching us. Not just random police officers. Us. It's us he's threatening. It's us he sees as his opponents."

"We know that, Rossi," Morgan says carefully. "That's why he left the drawing of JJ."

"Right." Rossi steps farther forward. "But when did he start? When did it become _us_? Think about this. Emily, you keep saying that he's been two steps ahead of us this whole time, and you're right. We know he's a narcissist. Staying ahead of us, the media attention, that's how he's been feeding his ego. But we also know he's highly intelligent and that dealing with us is a game. If we look at this like a game of chess, then each move he makes isn't just an attack, it's an invitation, designed to provoke a limited set of possible responding moves from us."

"And you're saying he's studied us," says Morgan. "Profilers. Our team. He knows our moves."

"He knows how we play the game," Hotch clarifies.

"My god," Prentiss says, looking up from the case file. "_Where will I be next?_ He's been asking us that on every drawing he left. He's been moving across state lines. He knew we'd be called in and he practically begged us to focus on a geographic profile."

"Are you saying he herded us here?" asks JJ.

"It makes sense," says Prentiss, closing the file. "Think about it. He usually moves on, but he hasn't. He waited for us here. He poisoned Reid. He knew we'd be right behind him. He's breaking pattern, he's escalating, but not in the way we expected him to."

"Okay, so we need to figure out why here," Morgan concludes, folding his arms. "We need to figure out what's so special about Breckenridge."

"But we need to be careful," says Rossi. "We're fully in his game now. If we're right, every move he's making is about us and how he predicts us to respond."

Morgan closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose.

Hotch takes a breath. He's about to speak when a loud crash rings out from far down the hallway, followed by a scream, muted behind the hallway's double doors.

Drawing his weapon, Hotch moves. "Prentiss, check Reid," he orders. "Morgan, watch the hallway. Rossi, JJ, with me."

* * *

tbc

* * *

P.S. On a slightly unrelated _thank you_—I really appreciated the detailed feedback on _Abjuration_ from those of you who gave it. Of everything I've posted in this sandbox, I was most hesitant about that one, so again, thank you.


	8. Chapter 8

**Part 8**

* * *

The scrubs are navy blue. New. The young man wearing them can't be much older than Reid. A group of hospital workers are already surrounding him—shoving at the metal table toppled near his head and patting at his face. A young woman with scrubs just a slightly paler shade is standing white-faced against the wall, covering her mouth, blood trickling from a spot on her forehead.

Weapon carefully controlled, Hotch looks past her and the commotion, staring one direction, then the other. Nothing stands out. Nothing seems out of place. Nothing…

He makes eye contact with JJ and then with Rossi as they finish checking in doorways, but they both shake their heads.

Slowly holstering his weapon, Hotch returns his gaze to the white-faced woman and asks, "What happened?"

\

"Garcia, nothing?" says Prentiss. She is standing next to the slanted head of Reid's bed, one hand leaning on the headboard, the other digging at her temple. Her headache has returned with a vengeance. The feeling of rushed intensity in the room shoving it up to a whole new level.

Reid has her cell phone balanced on his bent knee. He's staring at it with frowned eyebrows but his brain seems someplace else.

When she'd come into the room with her weapon drawn, he'd been standing uneasily upright, expression raw as his eyes met hers. "He's here, isn't he?" he'd said. "This is his next move. This is _check_."

She hadn't known how to answer—had turned instead to yell _clear_ for Morgan—but it made her wonder how much of the team's hallway conversation Reid had overheard. She'd wanted to ask. And she'd wanted to hug him. She hadn't had time for either and Reid hasn't said anything since.

"Nothing," confirms Garcia, voice slumped. "Every video feed at the hospital comes up blank for the last six hours. And he's good. At all the other locations, he messed up the camera feeds manually. The hospital cameras, he hacked."

"But… doesn't that mean you can trace him?" asks Prentiss.

"Not this time. When I said this guy was good, I meant like crazy good. No clear set of footprints anywhere—cyberly speaking. He was leapfrogging like mad. He could've hacked the cameras from China for all we know."

"But he didn't," says Rossi, pacing an irritated line around the other side of Reid's bed. "He's here. He's right here."

"I know, sir. Unfortunately, it still doesn't mean I can trace him. And truth be told, he's really starting to creep me out. It's like he's an expert in everything. The evil super genius counterpart to our young Reid there."

Prentiss glances at Reid's face, but it doesn't show a flicker.

"He could have had help," Hotch counters, leaning his fists into the rail at the foot of Reid's bed.

"We think he has help?" asks Garcia. "I thought we thought he was working alone."

Rossi shakes his head, stopping his pace to look at Hotch. "It doesn't fit the profile," he says.

"He wouldn't have a partner," Hotch agrees. "But if he needed to manipulate someone to help him, he would."

"Even if that's true," says Prentiss, "unless someone comes forward, it doesn't help us. Besides, we know he's highly intelligent, there's nothing we've profiled that suggests he couldn't have done it by himself."

Hotch sighs, but nods in acknowledgment. Straightening, he puts his hand to his forehead and Prentiss predicts he has a headache too. Maybe they all do. They're all becoming hyper-vigilant. Re-checking every angle. Jumping at shadows. Still too little sleep. They'll all have headaches until this is over, shadows under their eyes darker than Reid's. Maybe Hotch worst of all.

"Is the intern okay?" Garcia asks. A thin question, a simple redirection, but it breaks up the tension in the room.

"She'll be fine," answers Hotch, dropping his hand and looking behind him as the door opens, admitting JJ and Morgan. "She's in shock but mostly just grateful. She knows what the unsub was trying to do." Turning to JJ, he asks, "What about the orderly?"

"He's conscious now," JJ confirms, "but he couldn't give us a description either. He says when he came out into the hallway, he was looking down at the cart he was pushing. The unsub hit him on the head before he even saw what was going on. The officers are still with him. They'll tell us if he remembers anything more."

"How do you like that?" says Garcia. "A total knight in shining armor and he does it by accident. At least we have just one potential victim instead of two."

Morgan and JJ trade looks, tension creeping back into the room.

"What?" prompts Prentiss.

Clearing his throat, Morgan says, "We think he has another victim."

"Besides the one from The Douglas?"

"Yes." JJ nods. "The clerk at the bookstore where he left the picture of the last victim didn't show up for work this morning."

"He's had a busy night," says Rossi, hooking thumbs in his pockets.

Morgan folds his arms, then glances at Reid before speaking. "He's escalated, he's called us out, and he's hit us where it hurts. And if he's still following any patterns at all, we have less than 24 hours before those girls are dead. What move is he predicting us to make now?"

"He wants to split us up," answers Hotch. "Scatter our focus. If he'd managed to take the intern, we'd have three potential victims on our hands instead of two. He knows we're going to want to examine the crime scenes and talk to all the potential witnesses ourselves. Under different circumstances we'd split up to cover all our bases."

"He may not be finished. He didn't get the intern. He may still try to take someone else," adds Rossi.

"Where's my _go_ bag?" Reid asks, suddenly, looking up.

It takes everyone a moment to realize he's spoken.

Hotch refocuses, tipping his head slightly to the side. "We'll bring it to you when you're ready to be discharged," he says.

"I can't stay here," Reid returns, a flutter of frustration in his voice. "We have work to do."

"You can and you will," Hotch returns placidly. "One of us will stay with you."

Reid works his lips apart.

"Reid." Hotch shakes his head. "It's not a request. You stay. If you're doing well later, we'll discuss it again, but right now, you _stay_. Am I understood?"

There's a long drawn pause. Twisted intensity and buried sentiments.

Prentiss feels herself pulled into the briefest of flashbacks—West Bune, Texas, the aftermath of Reid standing between them and a teenage gunman, and the assortment of wary and worried looks tossed between Hotch and Reid all the way back to the plane. It's not the same, but it feels the same.

Finally, Reid says, "Yes sir."

Hotch's eyes flicker off Reid as he speaks back into the speaker phone. "Garcia, coordinate with the local police. Compile all the information you can on the new victims."

"Yes sir," she says quickly, like she's been holding her breath. "Before you can say Jack Robinson. Be safe."

The call clicks to silence.

"The rest of you, please meet me in the hallway."

* * *

tbc


	9. Chapter 9

**Part 9**

* * *

The hospital parking lot holds one beaten up Honda Accord and an assortment of SUVs. Sun glaring off windows. Subarus, Suburbans, trucks. Small. Big. Some with tinted windows. Some not. Hotch had been hoping that something significant would stand out—that by taking advantage of the relative safety in the crime scene before them, they'd find something that might put them ahead.

Standing with his hands on his hips several feet to Hotch's left, Morgan scuffs his heel over a line of cracked cement then turns to face the building. "A split visitors entrance," he says, pointing. "One main lobby. Two doorways. Four hallways. Over there, service entrance. Choose the door on the left or the service entrance and the receptionist is behind a high counter facing the other way." Gesturing back at the parking lot, he adds, "And we already profiled that the unsub drives an SUV. No wonder no one saw anything. He blends right in."

"His vehicle's convenient," agrees Hotch. "And in the towns he's been visiting, ubiquitous. The best way not to be noticed."

Morgan turns around again, adjusting his sunglasses. "So why not Starbucks?" he mumbles absently.

"What was that?"

"Something Reid said," Morgan explains. "There's a Starbucks in every town where the unsub left a flier. They're as common in these towns as they are in any city. Walk into one, and you're guaranteed to blend in with a crowd, but the unsub's never left a flier there. Always a coffee shop, or a bookstore that sold coffee, but never there. Why?"

Hotch shifts, considering, holding it up to the other puzzle pieces in his mind. "It's personal," he says, a truth that's becoming more apparent all the time. "We thought it was strategic." He takes a deep breath. "What do you think of when you think of Starbucks?"

Shrugging, Morgan says, "Starbucks, man. One on every corner."

"And the places where the unsub left fliers?"

"Trendy. Quirky. Maybe a little counter culture…" Morgan's lips twitch. "Garcia."

Hotch almost smiles. He shakes his head instead. "We need to go back to where Reid was poisoned. That's the coffee shop where the unsub chose to make his stand. It's significant, it's personal, and we need to figure out why."

"That's going to be tough to do with three new crime scenes," says Morgan. "The police chief is going to want to know why we're going backwards instead of forwards. He knows as well as any of us that we're on a time table."

"He's going to have to trust us," says Hotch.

They stop talking for a second, looking around for final details. For possibilities.

Anything.

Twice, Morgan sends a debating glance over. Hotch notices the way his mouth keeps closing when he looks away and the subtle lines of strain across his forehead. It's a familiar expression. It reminds him of that thin window of time after Gideon had left, but they hadn't known it yet, with Morgan in Milwaukee, tense, not sleeping for trying to figure out how to catch a killer and keep the rest of the team together.

Reid teetering on the edge. Garcia trying to run interference with management. Emily turning in her badge and JJ working twice as hard as she should have to.

Strauss staring predator-like over everyone's shoulders.

And Hotch at home with Haley on the verge of… with Haley on the verge.

A precipice for all of them. The moment everything almost completely fell apart.

Hotch never puts himself above the team, but he understands his role in it.

"I know you're worried about him," he says, the third time Morgan glances over.

Rising up from examining a collection of orange-tinged cigarette butts, Morgan rubs a hand over his chin, the shadow of the building's edge drawing a line across his shirt. He licks his lips, starts to shake his head, then stops and looks at Hotch. "A few years back, when he was having nightmares, I told you and Gideon about it because I knew he wouldn't. He was afraid you'd think he couldn't do his job or that you'd kick him off the team. Even then, this team, what we do, it was everything to him. And as much as it's put him through, it still is, man."

Hotch tips his head a fraction. "What are you saying?"

Morgan breathes, muscles flexing in his jaw—the tell that says he's readying himself to say something he's not sure he wants to. "When your car was bombed in New York, you should've stayed in the hospital. You didn't."

Hotch glances left. "We had an imminent terrorist attack on our hands, it's not the same."

"Look around you, Hotch." Morgan gestures. "Two girls have been reported missing in the last hour, not to mention the attempted kidnapping right here at this hospital with our entire team standing sixty feet away. We're being targeted. Girls are dying. One way or another, Reid's not going to sit this one out."

"I'm not giving him the choice."

"And I know you better than that," counters Morgan. "Ten minutes ago you were looking Reid right in the eye. Are you going to tell me the signals you got from him said that he's planning to just sit in the hospital and do as he's told? Who do you think he takes his cues from anyway? Man, I never thought I'd say this ever, but he is so much like you. These days… half the time, I don't know if he's stealing from your playbook or you're stealing from his."

Hotch feels the muscles tighten all along his throat. Gideon had said it once, back after Hankel had abducted Reid, when Hotch was worrying about everything he still hadn't taught him. _You lead by example._ Hotch himself had answered, _What kind of example is that?_

Behind the glass reflection off the doors to the building, he sees the vague images of Rossi and JJ moving around inside. For a second, the red reflection from the Emergency Entrance sign makes it look like blood has been splashed across JJ's face.

Reid's not the only one prone to seeing things right now. And Reid seeing what he saw didn't make him crazy. It was just like bringing a phantom into light. Turning the ghost that'd been passively haunting all of them into solid form. If only for a moment.

They all feel the empty spaces sometimes.

"What are you suggesting?" he says to Morgan, without looking at him.

"Path of least resistance," Morgan answers. "Bring him his _go_ bag, have the doctor check him out again. If he clears, Rossi and I will take him with us back to the coffee shop. We keep an eye on him. Prentiss goes with you and JJ to meet the police chief, and we're suddenly spread less thin. Two groups instead of three."

"The unsub may take exception to the fact that Reid survived the attack," Hotch says. "He may be a target, more than any of us."

"I know. And, trust me, I want him to stay here too, pretty much more than anything, but…"

"Let him do a little," Hotch finishes, "and we keep him from trying to do…"

"Anything stupid," Morgan ends.

Hotch nods. "Okay. If the doctor clears him."

"I agree," says Morgan.

A hollow sensation sets itself into Hotch's bones. "Morgan," he adds. "Don't leave him alone."

Morgan shakes his head. "Not a chance."

* * *

tbc


	10. Chapter 10

**Part 10**

* * *

When Reid steps out of his hospital room, he looks almost back to normal—shirt buttoned, bag slung across his chest—but when he reaches to brush hair out of his face, there's a tremble in his fingers Rossi can see from all the way down the corridor.

Hotch's expression doesn't flicker, but Rossi can tell he sees it too. The rest, he's not so sure about.

There are shadows lurking in Reid's movements, hovering ghosts Rossi feels uncomfortable trying to label, but he's seen them before, sometimes in his own mirror. Thinly veiled agitation. Doubt. Loyalty. Masked determination and pretended calm.

Fear, abandonment, abandon, loss.

Hotch shifts.

There is something in his demeanor too. Something that showed up when Reid was poisoned and is still there. A thread of thought obscurely woven beneath the subtle imprint of Jason Gideon. Rossi feels uncomfortable trying to label it too, but would if he found the right one.

"Are you sure about this?" he asks casually, looking back at Reid's shaky stance. Morgan is handing Reid his cell phone, speaking with stern eyes while Reid nods complacently.

"No," Hotch says, matter-of-fact. "But Morgan wouldn't have pushed if he thought Reid would really be safer here. And we both know he's right—Reid won't stay, not easily. With all of us as potential targets, we're better off spread less thin."

Down the hallway, Morgan turns his vigilant gaze towards the adjacent exit while JJ steps into Reid's space to say something Rossi can only guess at. Midway between them, holding Reid's _go_ bag, Prentiss turns to look at Hotch then back the other way.

These are Gideon's children. And this is Gideon's legacy. Rossi doesn't think it often, but sometimes he feels a little like the estranged uncle who showed up at the funeral of his brother only to discover he'd been given custody of the kids. Kids he didn't even know existed.

But Gideon's not dead. It only seems like it.

And none of them are children. Not really.

"Looks like we're ready," he says as Morgan steps back from the entryway.

Hotch nods, facing him briefly. "Keep in touch."

"Every thirty minutes," Rossi agrees. "Just like you said."

\

Inside the coffee shop, Reid stops two feet past the entrance, staring first at the table by his hip, then at the cork boards in the back. A sense of dread curling through his nerves. Dancing pin pricks under his skin that he can't make go away.

The cork boards. Square cut and simplistically framed, hanging casually against olive walls. Everything on them is exactly as it was when Reid entered the shop the first time—a list for poetry readings, group schedule for the summer art class, used kayaks for sell—but he feels like he's in a dream.

A dream with holes in it.

Jumbled, jagged and gaping.

Tugging at the police tape, Morgan follows him in, standing silent at Reid's elbow. In the background drones the low chatter of Rossi talking with the officers outside.

"Familiar?" asks Morgan.

Staring around, Reid nods, thinking back to what he'd said during the cognitive.

Morgan steps forward. "Two college-age students at the table by the door." He points, then walks onward, stopping by the bright gold of the window. "And here, three old guys talking about fishing?"

It's nearly the same time of day. The sunlight is pouring over the table the same way it was in Reid's memory. He nods again and fast forwards, looking behind the counter to where the workers had been, moving to stand where he'd stood when the girl had started speaking to him. Feet planted under him, he feels a hum in the floor, seeping up through the soles of his shoes. A tiny grinding noise comes through the wall—the clicking of some type of generator from the shop next door—but under it, Reid hears the phantom tapping of the pen, the echo of it building louder and louder through his brain.

Closing his eyes, he tips his head, curbing the impulse to clutch hands over his ears.

"Reid." Morgan touches his shoulder, stilling the noise. Reid's eyes open.

"Okay?" asks Morgan, expression worried.

"I'm okay," he answers absently, watching the shop tumble back in focus around him. His eyeballs feel cold. Blinking, he turns his head. Shifting away from Morgan's hand, he moves past him, towards the high table where he'd heard the tapping. Where he'd seen a man and a fake-feeling woman with a bright smile.

Stopping by the barstool, Reid takes a breath. The woman from his memory is sitting right in front of him.

A mural. A painting.

It's not particularly lifelike. No compelling realism in the shading. No extra expressive dynamic in the lines. Bright and colorful, but the depth his memory had given her never existed.

Feeling Morgan in his peripheral, he glances left, sees Morgan's understanding and holds the look.

After a second, Morgan pats his arm, then steps away, phone in hand.

Reid swallows heavily, and with Morgan's voice mumbling something to Hotch in the background, lets his eyes flit out the front window and across the street.

\

"It doesn't track," says Rossi, standing behind the counter where Ian Amari had been, Amari's interview transcripts flipped open in front of him. "What if the agent who came into the shop didn't drink coffee?

"We all drink coffee," says Morgan, glancing at Reid. Reid doesn't glance back. He has his arms folded and he's facing them, but he keeps looking out the window, eyes moving in intervals like he's having trouble tracking things.

"But he would have to know that," Rossi counters. "And he's not a guy who leaves things up to chance. What if Cornick hadn't decided to give Reid a cup on the house? And how did the unsub know when we'd show up? He might have known we were coming to Breckenridge, but the time of day?" He turns a page on the transcript. "According to the statements, no patrons lingered at the counter. No strangers sat in the shop all day. A lot of tourists. Mostly regulars," he reads. "No one came in that stood out, except for Reid."

"He's a profiler," mumbles Reid.

"What?"

Reid looks over, losing some of the distance in his demeanor. "We're always saying it," he explains. "Unsubs are the best profilers. Think about it. Of all the places in town he could have chosen, he chose here. We believe this place is personal for him in some way so he's probably been here before, more than once. He knows how they work. Knows where they keep the cups and why they'd give out cups on the house. He profiled the shop, or even the girl. He knows she would give out a cup of coffee. And us. We already know he's studied us. He knows us."

"That we all drink coffee?" says Morgan. "That's pretty specific."

"But not that hard to figure out," backs Rossi. "When I returned to the BAU, I had you all pegged as chronic coffee drinkers the minute I walked through the door. Especially him." He points at Reid.

Morgan snorts. "And here I thought we weren't supposed to profile each other."

"When has that ever stopped us?"

"Did you peg his sugar addiction too?"

"Only when he's not sleeping," Rossi says, tone droll.

Reid huffs, eyes flicking back out the window, but it's too true for Morgan to smile at. Not right now.

"I have another problem for you," he says instead, moving over to where the man with the tapping pen had supposedly been sitting. Reid can't remember what he looks like and he keeps averting his gaze when they bring him up, doubt in his expression that makes Morgan wonder if the man was really there at all, but it's the best they have to go on. "If I'm the unsub, how do I get the lidocaine in the cup?" He gestures across the space to Rossi's position.

"You're not that far from the counter," says Rossi, looking at the coffee cups stacked by his elbow. "If you know I'm going to be handing a cup over from right here, all you need is a distraction, a moment for the worker to look away."

"A federal agent walking into the shop would do that all on its own," says Morgan.

The door clacks softly, admitting two officers in uniform. One of them holds a folder up. "I have a map sent over by Agent Jareau. A seating chart or something put together by the two suspects in custody."

Rossi takes the folder. "They're not suspects," he says, opening it and handing a copy to Morgan.

In any other circumstance Morgan knows whose memory he'd trust better, but they need to fill in all the holes they can. "Reid," he calls, still staring at the paper.

Reid doesn't answer. Morgan looks up. "Reid?" he says louder, stepping to view the short hallway where the bathrooms are situated. The doors are open, the interiors dark. Turning slowly, he feels a catch in his gut. Rossi is watching him, the two officers glancing around and shrugging. The rest of the shop is empty.

Reid is gone.

* * *

tbc


	11. Chapter 11

**Part 11**

* * *

"_Reid!_" Outside, blinking through the glare of the afternoon sun, Morgan spots him. Standing just off the lip of the sidewalk across the street. Staring up at a simple sign. Standing so still Morgan's chest stutters, seized by yesterday's shadow, wondering if this is going to become that all over again. Then, Reid looks at him, and the emotion in his chest changes to something else.

Darting past a car pulling out from the curb, Morgan crosses. "Reid, you don't stay next to me, I'm going to put you on a damn leash, you understand?"

"It's an art store," Reid says absently, looking back at the sign.

"What?"

"It's an art store."

Morgan looks up. _West Sun Gallery_ is carved in a basic font across a cedar plank looped over the door.

"This is where Gideon was when I saw him. He was coming out of an art store."

Morgan breathes, deep, trying to mute the anger in his reaction. "Reid, I thought we talked about this. It was a hallucination. You were drugged."

"I dropped the coffee because I saw Gideon."

"You dropped the coffee because you were drugged."

"I would have swallowed more if I hadn't seen him."

Frustration pulses to the surface of Morgan's skin, flooding the capillaries. "Reid," he says carefully. "You were poisoned. Lidocaine toxicity causes seizures, doom anxiety, altered memory, hallucinations…"

"And sometimes schizophrenic episodes, I know. But not… not typically that fast. I'd barely taken three sips."

"Lidocaine is fast acting," Morgan reminds. "You know it is. There was enough in that cup to kill you three times over."

Reid tips his chin away, hands shifting to his pockets. Breathing in and breathing out. When he looks back, it's not at Morgan, it's at the sign, and the expression on his face is unreadable. "Most hallucinations from toxicity are auditory-verbal," he recites. "Visual in only 40% of reported cases, most often occurring with the elderly or in those already prone to mental illness."

Frowning, Morgan takes a step forward. From the corner of his eye, he can see Rossi and the two police officers standing outside the coffee shop, watching them. Rossi's face is calm. His body language isn't. Spreading the fingers on his right hand, Morgan makes a subtle _wait_ gesture and sees Rossi nod.

"It's one of the major symptoms of the disease," Reid continues. "Not being able to distinguish actuality from delusion."

"Reid," Morgan says cautiously, taking another step. "What is this about?"

"I thought the painting in the coffee shop was a real girl."

"You told Hotch she felt fake."

"But Gideon didn't." Reid looks over, eyes confused but steady. "That's… that's just it. Back when… when I was using, sometimes the dilaudid would make me forget. Sometimes it would make me dream. And sometimes it would make me remember things that I hadn't let myself remember for a long time. But I knew they were memories, or that they were dreams. I knew I was playing with fire but… when I came out of it, I always knew."

"Ah, Reid." Morgan closes his eyes briefly, rubbing fingers across his forehead, dropping some of the tension in his stance. It was hard to keep up with sometimes, watching Reid's mind run itself in circles, caught in issues that made too much sense. The fear of abandonment. The fear of everything else catching up to you.

"Kid, listen to me," he begins. "Gideon leaving hurt you pretty bad. You got poisoned and you thought you saw him. In my book, that's not that out there. He was important to you. I know you still think about him and you wonder where he is. Man, I do too. It doesn't mean you're going crazy."

Reid doesn't look over but Morgan can tell he's listening, and after a second, Reid speaks, words emerging with careful control over the visual emotion in his throat. "I just want to know if I could have really seen him," he says, gesturing. "It's an art shop. There are two paintings with birds in the window. Doesn't that… isn't it possible?"

Morgan slings a gaze across the street at Rossi, who is still watching them, and sighs deeply. "Okay," he concedes. "We'll go in. We'll ask. But if we don't find what you're looking for, you can't… You're not going crazy, kid. You never were."

Reid finally meets his eyes, giving what looks like a nod of agreement, but Morgan's always been a skeptic, even in the best of times.

\

The attendant in the store is skinny, older, with short-cropped black hair and dangling turquoise earrings. In the second room of the gallery, she stands surrounded by packing crates, distractedly leaning over one of them when Morgan walks up to her, showing his badge. "Excuse me, miss?"

Tipping her head up, the woman takes a moment to adjust the glasses on her nose. "Oh dear," she says. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I've been extra unfocused today. I didn't even hear you come in." Her voice is soft but it echoes. The floor underneath them is polished cement and they are surrounded by movable metal partitions. It makes the room seem larger than it is.

It gives Reid the impression of a warehouse.

It makes him feel like he is being swallowed.

"Can I help you?" she prompts.

Reid tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, a quiver in his fingertips he can't seem to get rid of. Next to him, Morgan pulls his wallet, slipping Gideon's picture from the back and ignoring Reid's surprised look. "Have you seen this man?"

The woman frowns, expression curious and slightly suspicious as she leans closer, studying the photo. "I don't think so," she says, glancing between them with a question in her eyes. "He doesn't look familiar."

"He would have been in the store yesterday," says Reid.

"Oh. Well that explains it. Unfortunately, I just got into town last night. My husband would have been manning the gallery yesterday. He's out right now, trying to get the rest of the festival art safely off to where it's supposed to be, but he should be back in few hours."

"Festival art?" asks Morgan, sliding the picture back into his wallet. Reid isn't sure if it's a genuine question or just meant to be polite. Either way, it grants a reprieve, keeps him from having to say anything, allowing the rest of his thoughts to stay stilted in silhouettes. Swallowing slowly, he steps back and lets his eyes wander, scanning the walls for birds, but there aren't any. Not in here.

"We donate part of our space for the Breckenridge Art Festival," he hears the woman explain. "There were a record number of participants this year and it's left us with a bit of chaos."

Reid sees the chaos. To his left is pure disorder. There are paintings propped on easels next to ventilated packing crates. Some paintings in frames, some not. All in various states of wrapping.

"Art isn't the easiest thing to transport," she says, when she sees him looking.

"It requires regulation of environmental elements," Reid quotes absently, continuing to look around. "Maintaining air circulation, a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and control of humidity levels."

For a moment, there is silence.

"Yes," she finally responds. "Yes, that's… very correct."

"Uh, annual event?" Morgan questions.

"Bigger every year," comes the answer. She says more, but Reid doesn't focus on it, letting her voice play in the background as he turns towards the wall on the right. It's an organized display, abstract moods and colors, the name _Simon Francis_ written delicately above the layout—a sharp contrast to the disarray in the rest of the room.

The painting in the center captures him. Oil on canvas. Blue and green and muted red. It's a landscape, conceptually. A prairie view with no defining features. It feels like a storm. Like wind and approaching fire. Like uncertainty and no answers.

"When your husband comes back," he hears Morgan say, "please have him give us a call."

\

Back out on the sidewalk, Rossi is waiting on their side of the street, wearing a wry but reserved expression. "Find anything?" he asks knowingly.

"Some impressive _Simon Francis_, and a slew of student displays," Morgan says. "But unless one of them is our killer, nothing that helps us."

Rossi opens his mouth, a flicker in his eyes, a subtle frown appearing between his eyebrows.

"What?" asks Morgan.

Reid looks over, squinting as his vision adjusts to the contrasting brightness of daylight.

Clearing his throat, Rossi glances at Reid, then turns his gaze skyward. "I don't suppose you found out what was above this place, did you?"

"Didn't think to ask," says Morgan, looking up, following Rossi's lead. "What are you thinking?"

"The unsub would have prepared for us early," explains Rossi. "In order to not draw attention to himself, he would have needed somewhere besides the coffee shop to wait for us. Someplace where he could see us come into town, keep watch on our locations, and head into the coffee shop at the right time. Nearly the entire front wall up there is made of windows. From there, he would have been able to watch the whole street." He gestures around. "No other building gives the same vantage point."

Reid looks up and sees what Rossi is talking about. Large windows, arched and wide. No lights are on inside and what he can see of the space looks empty.

"Doesn't look like anyone's home," says Morgan.

To the side of the art gallery, set into the slim alley before the next building are an ascension of wood steps towards the space they're talking about. Stepping around the block of the building's edge reveals a blue door at the top.

"What do you think?" asks Rossi.

"I think we should find out what's up there," answers Morgan.

\

In front of the blue door, holding the key given them by the woman downstairs, Morgan hesitates, feeling uncomfortable for reasons he can't explain.

Delia Poe—they'd finally learned her name upon their second appearance in her store—informed them that she and her husband owned the whole building, and rented the upstairs on a month by month basis. She told them it held a studio apartment and a space for painting. She told them that while there had been a few temporary tenants during the art festival, they had no renters now, unless her husband had forgotten to tell her.

In all likelihood, they would find nothing. Even if the unsub had been here yesterday, he would have covered his tracks like he did everywhere else. He was likely long gone.

Still.

"Reid," says Morgan, sliding the key into the slot. "Hang back."

Reid looks like he's about to say something, but doesn't. After a second, he moves several steps down, then turns to face them.

Getting a nod from Rossi, who draws his weapon, just in case, Morgan twists the key. He sees a sliver of dull emptiness as he starts to push the door open. A few inches in, it catches, a scratching noise grinding softly below. Morgan pauses, hand frozen on the knob. A second later, he hears a roaring silence, like all the air has been sucked from his ears. Then a phantom punch to his chest slams him backwards, tumbling, vision covered over in a cloud of grey.

* * *

tbc

* * *

Author's note: As far as I know, Simon Francis has never displayed his artwork in Breckenridge, Colorado. And the West Sun Gallery, though loosely patterned after a gallery in another small Colorado town, does not exist.


	12. Chapter 12

**Part 12**

* * *

The world is bone black. Silent. Calm and thoughtless.

Then, pearl grey and muted sound. A ringing noise is repeating, and repeating, as though from the bottom of a deep well.

Morgan blinks.

Bright blue sky fills his vision, framing a dark column of smoke, cinder ash floating down like rain. His eyes are watering. The burnt scent of plaster stings in through his nose. And all at once, life snaps sharply into focus. Loud and jarring.

The ringing sound blends into a clatter of raucous noise. Voices. Sirens. A murmuring undertow of panic and confusion. Someone, somewhere, is saying his name.

"_Morgan_."

"_Morgan."_

Rolling his head to the right, Morgan sees Rossi, propped on one elbow at the base of the stairs, cupping a scraped-up hand to his forehead.

"Rossi?"

"Are you alright?" Rossi asks persistently, voice metallic, like it's coming through a box.

It's not the first time he's asked, Morgan can tell. Opening his mouth, he's working for words when memory catches up to him. The upstairs studio. The blue door. The flash, absence, and oblivion.

"Reid," he coughs, grappling his limbs against the cement.

Rossi bends his head down, twisting to look another direction, a small smear of blood becoming visible on his jaw.

The sirens are getting closer, the whir jolting over Morgan's senses. "Reid," he repeats, getting his elbows under him and staring around.

"He's there," answers Rossi. "He's there."

\

_Spencer,_

_I knew it would be you who came to the cabin to check on me. You must be frightened and I apologize for that. I never meant to cause you any pain…_

"Reid? Are you with me?" Prentiss bends into Reid's eyeline, crouched at the stoop of the ambulance while the paramedic finishes peeling off the blood pressure cuff.

Her voice doesn't register right away. Gideon's keeps scrolling through his brain.

_You must be frightened…_

The medic drops the cuff in his bag and flicks eyes at Prentiss.

Hotch is standing a short distance behind them. Stoic. Watching. Reid swallows and holds his stare.

_I've searched for a satisfactory explanation for what I'm doing…_

"Reid?" Prentiss waves a wary hand in front of his face.

_You must be frightened…_

Reid darts his gaze towards her, skimming raw palms across his knees without registering the pain. "I don't know what happened," he says dully, pulling at the oxygen mask, not sure what she'd originally asked him. He can't seem to focus, and he can't seem to stop shaking. He's got a six-inch scrape down his right arm that he can't feel and his ears are buzzing, but he thinks Morgan was hurt worse. Morgan should be the one still sitting in the back of an ambulance.

_I never meant…_

"That's okay," she says, eyeing his face before slowly easing next to him, giving a brief nod to the paramedic, who stands and steps backwards, moving to talk with Hotch.

Hotch shifts, changing focus.

Reid swallows. He can't hear what they're saying. He can only see their mouths move.

_You must be frightened…_

Farther back, up the stairs they'd tumbled down, Reid can see Morgan sitting at the top with his head bent over. Posture angry, and distracted, and at the same time, tightly controlled. All around them are police officers and firemen. Mopping up. Holding onlookers at bay. Organized chaos.

Rossi and JJ are nowhere at all. Somebody probably said where they went—inside maybe—but Reid can't remember. His sense of reality keeps shifting. His memory unfixed. Too many gaps stacking on top of each other. Side effects lingering. Somewhere stuck between normal and not. He no longer knows where the line is and he doesn't want to think about it anymore. Sometimes it all feels fake except the image of Gideon and the glinting keys.

The paramedic and Hotch are still talking, glancing in his direction.

Prentiss has her hand on his knee. For a second, it feels restraining instead of grounding.

A cyclone of panic twists tempestuously around Reid's spine, setting a trembling sensation in the back of his brain. "I'm not going back to the hospital," he insists suddenly. Because he is _frightened_. And he wonders, even with Gideon's near savant-like insight into the human mind, how had he known to use that word?

"You don't have to," says Prentiss, with cautious assurance, and it's what Reid wants to hear but not what he expected. It means something. He just doesn't know what. Tapping his heel against a metal plate, he pulls air into his lungs, makes his chest expand as far as he can, then lets it out. His pants are torn on one knee, traced with blood and grit, contrasting the white bandaging underneath and the clean antiseptic sting.

_I knew it would be you…_

_I never meant…_

_You must be frightened…_

_You must be…_

"Do you remember how you told me to re-read Gideon's letter?" he asks.

After a moment, Prentiss nods.

"He knew what he was doing, and how it would affect us, but he couldn't really explain the rest of it." Reid coughs, licking his lips. "All we do is study human behavior. But we're surprised by it all the time."

"Reid."

"Do any of us understand the things we do?"

Prentiss breathes out slowly, moving her hand to his back. She doesn't say anything.

Reid looks away, rolling his fingers into fists to control the trembling. Gideon had known, he thinks. Somehow he'd known. _Scared_ is what Reid is of the dark. _Frightened_ is what he is of losing people.

Turning his eyes towards the sky, he stares steadily at the remains of ash. The drifts of smoke. Visible, probably, for a hundred miles.

"I think he's watching," he says.

Prentiss turns her head, looking worried. "Gideon?" she asks carefully.

"The unsub," answers Reid.

\

"Minimal explosive range," says Morgan, holding up a slim metallic device as soon as Hotch reaches the top step. The jagged smell of ozone sharply waiting. "Ignited by a scratch pad on the floor. Rigged more for smoke than fire." His voice is raspy. Hotch hands over a bottle of water and Morgan takes it without comment. "There's a back exit," he continues, gesturing inside. "Rigged the same way. They're dismantling it now."

Hotch stays silent, watching the agitation in Morgan's movements.

Morgan sniffs, stepping back from examining the door. Rubbing a gloved hand against his forehead, a trace of grey stains the bandage on his eyebrow. He looks over, meeting Hotch's gaze, dropping some of the stiffness from his shoulders. "How'd you get here so fast?"

"We were in the parking lot of the police station. We… saw the smoke," answers Hotch. "And you already had officers on the scene."

"Yeah," says Morgan, looking away, bagging the device in his hands and setting it aside on a wide ledge. "We were lucky." His gaze drifts downward, flickering on the ambulance below, jaw muscles clenching reflexively. "I never should have convinced you to let him leave the hospital."

Hotch opens his mouth, starting to shake his head. "You weren't wrong," he says finally.

Morgan's chest moves. A shudder hidden under a motion of disbelief as he looks up, protest already on his lips.

"The unsub went back to the hospital," Hotch explains. "He got the intern."

Morgan stands motionless. "I thought we had the police chief put an officer on her room?"

"He did," confirms Hotch. "Officer Nathan Reese. He's still unconscious. They haven't figured out why. No witnesses. A fire alarm was triggered. And Reid's room was… ransacked."

Dropping his eyes, clenching his jaw, Morgan forms a fist with his right hand and lifts it, like he wants to hit something. "Hotch," he says. "I hate to say this, but we're losing."

"No," refutes Hotch, calmly, steadily. "You followed your instincts, you profiled the situation, and you were right. If we'd left him in the hospital, even with one of us there, he would have been a clear and present target. And he wouldn't have stayed off the case. As much as I'd like to think he sees my orders as final, he's not above circumventing them. In this case, he would have."

"When we hit the bottom of the steps, he was shaking so hard, I thought he was going to have another seizure," Morgan admits. "Whatever that drug did—it's still messing with him, Hotch. I haven't seen him like this since…"

"Since the Riley Jenkins case put him back in contact with his father?"

Morgan starts to nod, then shakes his head. "Worse. I'm not sure exactly what he's thinking, but something's going on up there. He just... It's like he has something to prove."

Hotch nods. "In any other situation, I would take him off the case or send him back to D.C. But right now the rules have changed. We've become the unsub's target. We need the team together. And we need to stop second guessing ourselves. There are three potential victims out there somewhere. At the moment, they're likely still alive. This unsub has us doubting our own abilities to find them, and it's time we stopped."

"Fill in the profile," says Morgan, after a moment.

"Exactly," says Hotch.

* * *

tbc


	13. Chapter 13

**Part 13**

* * *

The police chief is, at the very least, acting like he trusts them. He seems to understand the uniqueness of his position. The jurisdiction of the case is in FBI hands. It was before he'd ever heard of it. But his town is under siege—three women missing and an officer down. He's not wasting time questioning their methodology or objectives. He's coordinating, and supporting, and waiting, but Hotch can tell he's worried.

Anyone would be.

The police station itself is tense with waiting, battening the hatches against the potential storm. His own team showing the wear. Rough in places, like fraying wire.

Across the station, in the conference room they've taken over, Morgan and Prentiss are moving files around the table with silent intent. Reid is bent sideways in a chair by the wall, one elbow pressed down over a map, fingers laced through the front of his hair.

The ghost Hotch sees sitting next to him feels too real. Form and substance. Waiting chessboard and calm expression.

"My men are still canvassing the street," the police chief says. "With what they've found so far, no one saw anyone up in that apartment. Ms. Poe's been down in Buena Vista for the past week at another gallery she owns, and her husband's in Denver for the day. Worse, he doesn't have a cell phone."

Hotch shifts. "When does she expect him to return?"

"According to her, just sometime today. I have uniforms waiting back at the store. They'll bring him here when he arrives."

"Thank you," Hotch says, running a finger across the back edge of his eyebrow as he turns his head to scan the room. There are four entrances into the building. Two stay locked to the outside. The others are monitored by police aids.

A wide window runs along the east wall where Rossi and JJ are standing. Too exposed. Behind them, hints of an actual storm can be seen far off in the distance and the hairs on the back of Hotch's neck whisper in protest.

"Is the husband a suspect?"

Hotch shakes his head, changing his eyeline. "No. It goes against the profile, but he may have information that can help. We should locate him as soon as possible."

The chief lifts his eyebrow, questioning.

"The unsub wouldn't be married," Hotch explains. "At least not currently."

"Okay. What about the kids from the coffee shop? You want me to still keep them in custody?"

"They're not under any suspicion, but I would keep them here if you can. The unsub has a tendency to double back and they could both be targets." It's paranoia in excess, but Hotch doesn't want to let loose pawns in a game where he can't see the whole board.

"Hotch," calls JJ, moving away from the window. "We're ready."

\

In front of the whiteboard, Hotch clears his throat, drawing focus from the uneasy rigidity outside the room they've claimed. "We have to stop treating this unsub like he has the higher ground," he begins. "He has us thinking he's some kind of ghost and it's time for that to stop. All the second guessing we've been doing stops now."

Reid shifts on his chair, creaking metal against polished concrete as he drops his gaze, pale hand rubbing at his eye. To Morgan, he looks worse now than he did right after the explosion. Limbs wilted, words and thoughts averted to some distant space. He's not shaking anymore, not with the same intensity, but everything else about him seems wrecked.

"He's studied our methods," Hotch's voice continues. "That's apparent. He knows us—yes. But we know him better. Better than he knows himself and escalation to this level doesn't come without leaving a trace. Somewhere in the last 24 hours he's told us who he is. We need to figure out where."

"Gideon always told us our best weapon is a thorough and accurate profile," Reid says, lifting his eyes from the table.

Hotch looks towards him, silent, mouth closed.

Morgan flicks his gaze between the two and sees Rossi do the same.

"He's right," Hotch says, an instant later. "Everything. We need to fill in everything we have. Everything we've learned since coming here."

Fighting the taunt of unease still locking down his jaw, Morgan breathes, shutting out the bitter smell of smoke still sticking to his skin. "He used a bomb," he supplies. "We never profiled for that."

He's trying not to think backward, trying not to think in _should haves_, but it's still bothering him. Along with his jacked knee and the pulse he can feel beating through the cut on his forehead. All his experience working ATF bomb squads and he'd nearly walked half the team into oblivion.

Hotch folds his arms, the joints of his suit jacket wrinkling finely. "Sometimes it's what they don't do," he mumbles, meeting Morgan's eyes. "You said the explosive was rigged more for smoke than fire. The unsub didn't intend the blast to kill."

"No," agrees Rossi, moving away from the wall. There's a scrape through his goatee, darkening the skin below his lip. "He just intended to remind us he's still ahead of us. It's theatrics. He's like a puppet master, lurking in the shadows, watching the chaos he creates."

"Watching," says Prentiss, looking at Reid. "You could see that smoke for a hundred miles. Wherever he was, he wanted to be sure he saw it."

JJ hooks an elbow on the table, eyes gliding momentarily to the drawing of herself, tacked to the left of the actual victims. Like faded photographs. Like past and present and future tense. "We do know he's watching," she says.

Looking away from the picture, Morgan leans back and drags his notebook closer, the smudged bandage on his forearm is harsh against the clean paper. "Okay, so he's watching." He breathes. "But setting an explosive like that just to see it from a distance? To know we figured out where he was watching us from when we got into town? To taunt us? Whatever his game with us is, you gotta think there might have been simpler ways to accomplish all three. Going from up close and personal serial killer to setting explosives? It doesn't track. There's gotta be more to it."

"Alright." Prentiss folds her hands and rocks forward. "What does precedent tell us about someone who sets explosives?"

"That it can be for a number of reasons," answers JJ. "Vandalism, make a statement, intimidate, terrorize. At this point, the unsub could fit any of those, couldn't he?"

"It's almost overkill," says Reid.

At that, Prentiss lifts her head a little, looking at the others. "Which begs the question, what did we do to this guy? He wants to show he's smarter than us, he needs the ego boost, I get it, but he's gone to the extreme to show us how much better than us he is. Why?"

Pacing to the right, Rossi stops, rubbing a hand over the scab in his goatee, looking at the drawings and the media fallout stacked in folders below. "Why does anyone push for attention? We ignored him," he says.

"So the explosive was to make sure he has our attention?" asks JJ.

"He already has our attention," reminds Morgan.

Hotch frowns, stepping closer to Rossi, peering over the layout on the board. "Maybe our attention isn't enough," he says, tapping a finger over his chin as he unfolds his arms. "Call Garcia, we need her in on this. And we need a list of everyone who's rented that space. He's smart enough not to give us blatant access to his identity, so I doubt he's one of them, but if it is overkill, maybe we weren't the only target."

Morgan's about to comment on that when his cell starts to buzz across the table. "Speak of the devil," he says, pressing the button that will put Garcia on _speaker_. "We were just about to call you. Talk to us, angel wings."

"Are you guys okay?"

Reid turns his head, rubbing again at his eye. Morgan exchanges a glance with Rossi, clears his throat, and refocuses on the phone. "Yeah, Garcia. We're fine."

"All of you? Really, actually okay?"

"Garcia, we're good. What's up?"

"Get me on video link," she orders. Her words are agitated, frustrated and worried, but hearing her voice settles something inside him, nerves throughout his body uncoiling in response. He's never known how she does that. Closing his eyes, he presses fingers to the bridge of his nose and lets his muscles loosen.

Prentiss moves the laptop over, pushing it to the middle of the table. "Connecting you now, Garcia."

When Morgan opens his eyes again, detailed irritation is sitting before him in megapixel clarity. "If you guys are okay, then why, _why _on earth would you let me hear about this on a news feed?" Garcia bends her head down and the screen changes. Footage of smoke rising from the art gallery falls into view, shifting angles at intervals to capture the full aftermath of the explosion.

JJ stands, glancing over at Hotch. "Garcia, you got this off a news feed? Is this national?"

"Not yet. Currently, it is statewide breaking news, but the headline of _Small Tourist Town Seized By Serial Killer Who Sets Bombs_ is kind of an attention getter, and I'd say it's only a matter of time."

"Is that what they're reporting?" asks Hotch.

"Colorado Five has the lead in. They're saying they don't know who's actually responsible for the explosion, but a letter was hand delivered to their office, indicating the unsub may be claiming responsibility. No actual verification on that though, and no report on what was actually in the letter. Also, no description of the guy who delivered it. And wait, it gets worse. They're reporting that in conjunction with the bombing, an officer was critically injured during an abduction at the hospital this morning, where, and I quote—_Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Spencer Reid was recovering after being poisoned by the killer_."

Reid stiffens, eyebrows drawing up as he glances to Hotch.

"Garcia," Morgan says, sitting straighter. "They used his name?"

"They used his name."

JJ palms her phone off the table and starts dialing. As she leaves the room, Morgan hears an opaque voice pick up the line on the other end, and the beginning of JJ's diplomatic rebuke—_I thought we were clear that if you had any contact at all you would let us know. Obstruction isn't…_

"We knew he'd be upset that what he did to Reid didn't make the papers," reminds Prentiss.

"So he made sure it did." Looking at Hotch, Rossi adds, "You were right. Our attention isn't enough."

Hotch stands motionless a moment, a considering expression on his face. Morgan's about to ask what he's thinking, but Hotch speaks first. "Keep going on the profile," he orders, then follows JJ out the door.

\

The TV screen across the bullpen is tuned to the footage, drawing the majority of the focus in the room. The gallery owner is sitting with an officer at a desk near the wall, presumably reviewing her statement, now distracted by the images of her gallery on fire.

"We need to do something about this?" the chief asks, moving to meet him.

"Yes," Hotch says. "We're going to need you to make a statement to the press. Primarily, we're going to need you to reiterate the profile we released earlier, and the safety precautions we've laid out for the public. Agent Jareau will help you. We'll know better what we need you to say when we know more about what information they have."

"Hotch," JJ says, closing her phone and coming over. "The letter seems legit. They're faxing a copy now and sending someone over with the original. And Garcia was right. No one seems to have a description of the person that dropped it off. It was found on the news desk in a manilla envelope marked urgent."

"And the press?"

"They're killing the information he put in about Reid for the next broadcast, and for anything that goes national, but they're running with the rest of it."

Hotch sighs. "Okay. We need to put together a press release from the police department. He wants Reid's name read. We're not going to give him that."

"I'm on it," she says, stepping away. "Chief Harris, I think we should use your office, and, if you can, pull the investigator who read the previous statement. He should join us."

The chief nods, following after throwing a final glance at Hotch.

Hotch stares after. Beyond them, he can see the storm has moved farther across the sky. The wind is picking up, whipping the tree outside the wide window side to side. As he watches, it springs back towards the building, branches knocking against glass with a sharp thwap. Turning away, he steps left into an empty hallway, the only light within coming from a lone, droning water cooler and an emergency exit sign. Fumbling for one of the triangle paper cups sitting at the cooler's edge, he drinks, swallowing slowly before crushing the cup into the trash.

_When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth_, he thinks. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sherlock Holmes.

Pressing two fingers to his forehead, he sighs.

Contrary to what Rossi may think, he doesn't spend a lot of time consciously thinking about Jason Gideon, but every once in a while he sees his long shadow flickering in the eyes of his team members, even Rossi's. And sometimes, when he looks at Jack, he remembers Haley being pregnant, bantering about naming him Gideon Hotchner.

Gideon. Mighty warrior.

Hotch remembers a lot from those baby naming books.

Aaron means _mountain of strength_.

Spencer means _dispenser_. With all the information Reid gives out, somehow it fits.

And, like Reid, Hotch remembers the things Gideon used to say, his lessons on profiling, the authors he used to quote.

Pouring another cup of water, Hotch closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, Rossi is watching.

"What is it?" asks Hotch.

"Don't you second guess yourself either," Rossi says.

"What do you mean?"

Rossi steps closer, a near mirror to Hotch's stance. "This morning at the hotel, when we were talking about Gideon, you said you kept thinking something, but you never told me what. Whatever it is, you're still thinking it. Want to tell me now?"

Hotch looks down the hallway to where the team is persisting in the profile, reviewing everything, just one more time. Looking for all the missing pieces.

After a minute, he looks back at Rossi. "I've been thinking this is the kind of case Gideon would have excelled at, and this unsub knows us too well."

* * *

tbc


	14. Chapter 14

**Part 14**

* * *

A tree outside the window is tapping the glass behind Reid's left ear. Tapping. Rapping. Tapping again. Wholly inharmonious with the scattered twitching in his eye. Through the branches, he sees the late afternoon sun is giving way to wind, making the shadows outside bend and sway—drawing warped, face-like reflections in the window panes across the street.

Odd mouths.

Odd eyes.

Quivering backdrop and silent screams.

"Reid," Morgan says, redrawing his attention, tick in his jaw and gaze steady. He holds out a water bottle. "Drink."

Reid takes it and swallows, tasting metal.

As he sets it back on the table, the cold plastic crumples inward at the base. The crackle grinds against his eardrums and he leans away, moving the fingers knuckled into his eyelid to spread flat over the map beneath his elbow, squinting from the pulsing glare in the glossy reflection.

A blue dot marks the coffee shop. And the bookstore.

The hotel. The hospital.

The gallery.

Dots surrounded by waterways and hiking trails. Buildings and roads and empty spaces. Everything looks connected. Like anywhere. Like everywhere.

"There are hundreds, if not thousands of potential secluded locations the unsub could be using that would still give him access to the main roads through town," he says. The words clang against his teeth as they emerge, but they come out clear.

Morgan's eyes hold, then, finally, shift away.

"Add to that no reports of suspicious activity, and the massive surrounding wilderness he could be skulking around in, and we have another giant dead end," drolls Garcia.

Prentiss clicks her pen and un-clicks it, shaking her head. "Wherever he has them, it won't raise suspicion," she agrees. "He'd make sure of it. He calculates for ambiguity but even then, it's controlled."

Morgan stands, angling towards the layout of evidence, rubbing a hand behind his neck. "Everything he does is controlled," he says, gaze running over the board as he breathes, staring at the drawings. The remainder of motion in his body dissipates. Settling into character. Communing with the dead. "Everything he does has a point."

Reid moves the map away, setting it by the water bottle, glossy side folded over.

"But what point?" Morgan mumbles absently. "If I'm the unsub, I'm not a common serial killer. No no, I'm an artist. And I have perfected my craft. True art requires focus. Patience. Me, I'm a master at those things. I'm meticulous. I'm specific. I know all the angles."

Reid dips his head down, pressing the heel of his hand against the twinge in his eye socket. _Specific_, his mind echoes.

The unsub knows his name.

Knows _Doctor_ and _Agent_ and _Spencer_. The shape of JJ's eyes, and to which ear she holds her cell phone.

Where they've been. Where they're going.

In the silence, Prentiss presses fingers to the bridge of her nose, then drops them away, eyebrows unfolding. "Except for Reid's room," she says, opening her hands. "He tore it completely apart. Total destruction. It's the only action he's taken that's been uncontrolled. He wasted time where he could have been caught. He shredded the sheet. He dismembered the pillow. It was an absolute emotional response."

"What does it mean?" asks Garcia.

Morgan turns. "It means he was truly expecting Reid to still be there. Reid being gone from the hospital wasn't in the plan."

"Didn't he mean him to be gone? Not to hex us by dwelling on our near tragedy, but wouldn't he think he was already dead?"

Reid touches his hands together, running his thumbnail under the index of the opposite. He can feel the scrape on his arm now. A six inch, low throbbing fire that seems both part of him and not.

Morgan folds his arms. "It probably didn't matter to him either way. If the agent he poisoned died—no problem. If he didn't, the unsub knew he could finish the job during the abduction from the hospital. Even better. We all think he's in the clear and bam, double whammy."

Prentiss tilts onto her elbows, pausing all movement, then shifting back, drops her pen on the table with a sigh. "None of which tells us what we need to know."

"Okay okay okay," says Morgan, jiggling thumb against forehead as he paces away from the table and back again. "New angle. Garcia, how's that tenant list coming?"

On screen, Garcia's focus splits to another direction, hands drumming. "Yep, here it is… the digital file from the gallery is up. I am running it now… but…"

"No no no, sweetness, I need you to be your magical self right now. Do not give me a _but_."

Her fingers stop moving. "I understand, but take that away and you are seriously inhibiting my mojo."

Morgan leans forward. "Go on."

"Looks like most of the tenants paid cash. Short-term rental periods. No lease agreements. No social security numbers or background checks required. It's like an art-drifter's haven. Festival participants, traveling writers, musicians, students. The Poe's kept records, but they're incomplete. And there is literally a John Smith on the list. If that is the tenant's real name, I can trace him, but I need a cross reference to find anything real. Even knowing their ages would help."

Prentiss flips her notepad back open, dragging it away from the files. "Try cross referencing former employees of the coffee shop."

"Already done. No matches."

Morgan pushes a fist into his forehead.

Reid sniffs and looks towards the fliers. The images narrow and thin. Each picture reduced to angles and lines. One after another. Losing form and substance. Losing sanity and life and solid footing—belief in happy endings. A collection of empty spaces. The abyss staring back.

History repeats itself, he thinks, even when you remember it.

The door opens, and Hotch comes in. The dim light without the room creeps with him, tying knots around his chest and ankles. Locking down the shadows on his face and the blur of thought behind his eyes.

"Reid." Prentiss touches his arm. "Alright?"

He sheds the air from his lungs abruptly, shifting his gaze to her. Working his throat, he pulls back slowly. "I'm fine," he mumbles, and watches Hotch clock the lie without saying anything.

Morgan opens his mouth, lets it hang for a moment, then clears his throat. "Garcia, what about customers? Regulars? Can you cross reference that?"

"That is a little more difficult. If they paid with a credit card, I might be… Wait, that's… Agent Rossi is calling me on my cell phone."

"Answer it," orders Hotch.

She hesitates, glancing to the others, then nods her head. "On it."

The screen turns dark.

Morgan looks over. "What's going on?"

"I'll let you know if it pans out," answers Hotch. "Where are we on the profile?

\

The lowest shelf of the vending machine has caramel Bugles and ranch flavored Doritos. JJ feeds another five into the slot and makes the selections, standing against the whir and grind of the cranking metal in silence. The world is tilting just a fraction to the left, the way it always does when she hasn't slept enough. But she's used to operating like this. She's used to compensating.

She feels detached from it, in a sense. From her picture on the flier. From Reid's nearly not waking up. From the three current victims.

Maybe she's starting to better compartmentalize.

The flap at the bottom of the machine is heavy. It catches the corner of the chips as she pulls them but not the Bugles. She adds both to the pile.

From behind the sergeant's desk, Rossi folds his phone down, turning his head towards the conference room, then back around to look at her. The dried blood on his chin appears darker than it did before and as he comes closer, the machine's glow against his beard turns it black.

"None of us have eaten since yesterday," she explains. "It's not much, but Officer Walker just downed four packages of peanut butter crackers, so at least it's safe."

"Good idea," he says.

She pushes another selection, then brushes a strand of hair behind her ear to wait.

"Is the chief ready with the statement?" he asks, tapping his middle finger against the base of his cell phone, like he's waiting for something.

"He doesn't understand the whole reason behind it, but he's with us," she answers. "They won't use Reid's name and they're going to tell the press there are no agents in the hospital and no fatalities. They'll show photos of the three missing women, reiterate the profile, and they're going to make the statement from the Douglas, not from here—distance the press from our presence on the case."

"Good," says Rossi. "Good."

JJ watches the conference room for a moment, watching the team's mouths move. The light in the room contrasting more and more with the outside grey.

"JJ. Are you okay?"

She moves her eyes over, giving half a smile. "Shouldn't I be asking you that?"

Rossi's expression doesn't change. "We have the best profilers in the world in there," he says. "We're going to figure this out."

"Maybe that's the point."

"What do you mean?"

"The unsub keeps waiting for us to figure things out. And when we do, he's waiting for us. What happens when we make another move?"

Rossi closes his mouth, but his fingers are tapping at the phone again.

JJ reaches to pull the Snickers from the vending machine.

Above her head, a loud crack overtakes the station, bringing her upright, yanking her focus to the long window on the east wall. A branch, snapped off the tree outside, smacked into the glass.

Inside the conference room, she catches the tail visual of Hotch easing his hand away from his weapon.

She counts slowly as she breathes out. The world has tipped another fraction to the left, and maybe she's not compartmentalizing as well as she thought. She catches Rossi's expression, seeing him watch the same things.

He makes eye contact, and shakes his head. "We won't just look at one move," he says.

* * *

tbc


	15. Chapter 15

**Part 15**

* * *

When he arrives at the police station, Delia Poe's husband looks relieved to see his wife, but confused at the setting, like he's unsure what he's just been brought into. Despite the increasingly violent movement in the air outside, the atmosphere inside the station is static. Motionless. Too much like inaction. Too much like waiting for something bad to happen. And Prentiss can tell he feels it.

The officer escorting him in looks confused too, glancing towards the chief's empty office, and then towards Rossi who is hunched over the sergeant's desk, writing in a small notebook, phone to his ear.

"I got this," says Prentiss, getting to her feet.

Hotch nods, mouth closed. A reserved movement, even for Hotch, but she nods back.

"Emily." Morgan stops her, handing her the tenant list.

As she starts to move out the door, she exchanges a look with JJ, who shakes her head, shrugging minutely in response.

\

Checking his watch, Morgan feels his ribcage hollow. They're running low on time. "Okay, once more," he sighs, crumpling the Twix wrapper under his palm. "We know this is personal. We know he's educated, narcissistic, organized."

"Extremely organized," says Hotch. "Not just detail oriented. Dedicated. He's a perfectionist. When he failed at the hospital, he went back. Like he had to correct it."

"Compulsive?" asks JJ, standing by the doorway.

Morgan shakes his head. "Driven. This guy does not like mistakes. They contradict his perception of his own intelligence and go against whatever it is he's trying to accomplish by playing this game with us."

"Everything he does is specific," repeats Reid, gaze displaced, fixed towards the pictures on the board. "The way he's been posing the women. The way the lines…" He stops and swallows, coughing before he continues. "The way the arms are crossed. The positioning is all the same. It represents something to him. If it's not remorse, it's part of a fantasy. Mistakes threaten the fantasy."

Unfolding his arms, Hotch steps closer to Reid, who is still staring at the fliers. "What are you thinking?"

Reid holds himself steady, then looks up. "Breckenridge is not a place he's moving on from because it's a place he's returning to."

Hotch looks again at the board, contemplating. "There's something here he needs us to see. Something we've missed."

Morgan flexes his hands. "Or something he needs to correct. We never did find his learning curve," he says. "No early victims."

Hotch seems ready to respond to that when Rossi leans in the doorway. "Hotch," he says, gesturing with his chin.

\

"Mr. Poe."

"Chad, please."

"Chad." Emily nods. Across the station, she can see Hotch exiting the conference room, talking with Rossi, eyebrows drawn. She pulls her mouth together, watching them for a moment, then refocuses on Mr. Poe's weathered face and his wife's polite expression. "Chad," she repeats. "It's our understanding that you were the primary person to deal with the tenants in your studio."

"My wife," he begins, reaching to fold his fingers around Delia's. "She manages our gallery in Buena Vista. We both spend a lot of time driving back and forth, but especially her, and I didn't want her to have to worry about dealing with the renters on top of everything else. We never made money from it anyway. We considered it our contribution to culture."

"We understand. We just need you to look over the names, and tell us what you can remember about each one. Ages. Occupations. Anything could help. Can you do that?"

"Sure, sure. You think it was one of them who did this?"

She starts to answer, but for a fraction of a second her attention strays. From the corner of her eye, she watches Rossi collect his jacket and keys. Hotch is still speaking to him, saying something furtive she can't hear.

"It's possible," she says, back on point. "Right now, we're just investigating."

\

"Hotch, this is insane," insists Morgan, following Hotch down the hallway towards the back exit. "You're the one who said he wanted to divide us. You're the one who said we needed to keep the team together."

Hotch stops, but continues pulling on his jacket. "Look at the profile," he counters. "The unsub has been as busy today as we have. He intends us to find those girls dead by morning. To make that happen, he has to take time with them. He's likely with them right now, not focused on us."

"Even if that's true, we're still his target—we're the ones he's looking at."

The zipper catches. Hotch draws it upward. "Rossi will be with me," he says, moving again towards the exit. "We'll be back as soon as we can. We'll let you know then if we have a valid lead."

Morgan runs a hand over his head, sucking air through his teeth. "Damn it, Hotch, why not now?"

Hotch turns abruptly and comes towards him. "Because right now, it's just a hunch, and we may not like what we find." He glances beyond Morgan's shoulder, into the other room at Reid. A motion so brief, so subtle, that Morgan draws back.

"How big of a hunch?"

"Let's just say, if I'm wrong, I don't want our entire team on a wild goose chase. And if I am wrong, I need you to keep going on the profile."

Morgan breathes out, but his muscles won't relax.

"We have our cell phones," Hotch assures. "We'll be in touch. Keep us updated."

Shaking his head, Morgan rocks his chin to the side, then frowns through his eyebrows. "You asked me once if I trusted you, Hotch. I'm trusting you now. Don't get dead."

Chest easing down, Hotch nods, and they separate.

\

Garcia taps her pen against her desk's edge, watching the plume at the top flutter responsively. Unlike her computers. The computers are betraying her. The magical information they usually provide refuses to appear.

She can usually find the right angle if she just keeps going over it. She's learned that deaths from lidocaine aren't common and are often misdiagnosed, and therefore are not in any records that help. Particularly not in any records regarding rape. Lidocaine toxicity is more common, but not well documented. Search after search brings up the same information. No early victims emerge.

Tapping her pen again, she watches the responding flutter, and ponders.

"Co-morbid symptoms," she mumbles to herself, typing the new search into her engines, then sits back, letting them run. The resulting information flashing before her doesn't seem very helpful.

Growling, she switches to another monitor, pulling up the file from the gallery, looking again at the tenant list. JJ sent her everything. The whole file. Crime scene photos, computer records, blueprints. As the digital images pixilate across her screen, she can tell the damage to the art gallery itself was minimal, and collateral. More from smoke, and from the wall of fire foam sprayed across the west entrance, than from the actual explosion.

Most of the paintings survived. The Simon Francis work was completely undamaged. A few of the festival displays hadn't fared quite as well. She scrolls through them anyway, pausing on one with bright flowers over a chocolate canvas. Blue Speedwell and Periwinkle mixed with other colored flowers she can't name. The simple contrast and the variety of life woven together make the painting feel both joyous and quiet and she stares for a moment.

It's the only thing that's made her feel good all day.

Leaning closer, she notes the name of the artist, listed on a white label imaged to the side of it. Retreating a little, she frowns, glancing from the label to the tenant list and back again.

Rolling over to her original screen, she clears the search and starts a new one. Following it with another, and then another, adjusting the parameters as she goes, fingers moving faster and faster. Within five minutes, there's something on screen she can recognize.

"Oh my gosh," she says, grappling sideways for her phone. "Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh."

\

Hotch steps out of his vehicle scanning left to right, weapon drawn. The wind whips patterns across his jacket, pulling at his hair. Rossi checks the safety on his TRP and follows suit. Struggling twigs and tumbling spruce needles catch and snap under his boot.

Getting the vehicle door closed takes more force than usual, caught against the direction of the air. Finally, it connects to the lock-catch with a bang, and behind it, a long grumbling break of thunder crackles overhead. There's no rain yet. Just wind, and the sound of the running river, barely audible under everything else.

As the rumble begins to die down, Rossi catches Hotch's eye.

"That way," shouts Hotch, pointing towards the river, at the shadows of three standing structures, facing the water.

Rossi nods and turns, hands gripping his weapon, looking into the black shadows under the tallest trees, then back the way they came. It's something he's attuned to, but he doesn't yet feel like he's being watched. The whole area feels hollow and abandoned.

No sense of life.

No light, except the flash of lightning stretching overhead.

* * *

tbc


	16. Chapter 16

**Part 16**

* * *

"Talk to me, sugar. What have you got for us?"

Morgan spins his phone to the middle of the table and glances from Reid to JJ. Reid rubs knuckles over his torn sleeve and doesn't make eye contact. He looks a million miles away and Morgan's trying to ignore it. Trying not to be bothered by being unable to fix it. Trying not to outguess whatever's going through Reid's head.

JJ steps closer, tapping fingers at the table's edge while Garcia speaks.

"Okay, I widened the search again, but as is the custom lately, got zilch. If this guy killed early, he left no evidence. And, before you ask, I quadruple checked police reports and there are zero accounts of a charismatic but psychotic man wielding a syringe while trying to rape someone."

Morgan leans forward. "What about—"

"Nothing, my doves. No regular date rapes either."

JJ tilts her head at Morgan and lifts her eyebrows.

"None that raise the kind of red flags we're looking for, anyway," Garcia clarifies.

Morgan sighs through his nose. "Okay, please tell me there's a _but_ in there."

"Now you want one," she teases.

Morgan smiles fleetingly. "Garcia," he returns warningly.

"Look at your screen," she says seriously.

\

The walk towards the main building isn't long, less than ten yards, but the wind feels colder the closer they get to the river. More persistent. Currents of air are creeping into Rossi's sleeves. He ignores them, checking over his shoulder once again.

The track behind them is empty.

South of the structure they find packed earth and silent vehicles. Flashes of lighting glinting off pale bumpers. A Subaru Outback with Michigan plates and a green Landrover hunched low on its tires. Parked haphazardly over dead weeds.

An unlit lamppost lists in the center, sending out a pinging noise as it rocks against its base.

Across the dirt, close to the dock extending into the river, is a black Excursion, motionless against the backdrop of wind. Nearly invisible. As they walk towards it, Rossi shines a flashlight into the side window. He sees nothing.

Hotch turns away, scanning beyond the fender into the trees. Meeting Rossi's gaze, he gestures with his chin towards the outbuilding and the row of narrow cabins beside it, barely visible. Rossi hesitates, then nods agreement, listening to the wind roll through the trees while watching Hotch step away from him, waiting a beat before moving back to the Landrover. It's empty also, but leans on one side, like something heavy is tilting the trunk.

The Subaru, when Rossi shines his flashlight through, shows him the twist of a rolled-up tarp and a box of paper. Next to them, a Coleman stove.

Neat. Organized. Inconsequential.

His chest expands as he pushes away and looks back towards the tree line, watching the Douglas firs straighten and sway over Hotch's shadow, folding around the expanse of space between them. Despite the vehicles, despite the evidence of comings and goings, the air shouts hollowly with isolation.

This is the end of a road. The end of several roads. And though he has no concrete proof—just Hotch's hunch and a gallery with a Simon Francis exhibit—Rossi feels it. They've found the right place.

\

Across the laptop's display stretches the image of a carefully composed painting. Majestic. Gold hues rounding the edges. Quiet, warm tones dragged into a cold center. It depicts a woman, elevated on a lone sepulcher, eyes closed as though sleeping. The posing is the same as in the drawings of their victims. Same positioning of the body. Same crossed arms. Life in suspension. A bragging of tragedy.

Reid bites the inside of his lip and reaches forward, moving the screen so he can see it better. The shift of casing against table creates a whispering sound that stays in his ears. Like the rustling of leaves swirling through the memories in his head. The new angle works, however. The details in the picture become sharp and alive. Tall trees stand in the background. Dried leaves line the base, crumpled around the girl, under and over. Everywhere.

He knows what that feels like. Tobias Hankel had made certain.

In the painting, the hollow space in the tomb below the woman is dark. Shadows are scattered across the interior, mixed with color—hints of clothing, hints of dull white stretched and trapped in the darkness. One woman hidden beneath the other. One bone. One skin.

_I ought to bury you alive in there, give you time to think about what you've done._

_I know what I've done, _Reid thinks.

He remembers it like it was yesterday.

_And he that curseth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death._

He starts to tilt the computer frame farther but gets the angle wrong. The refracted shine from the fluorescent light above washes into the corners of vision. Holding him motionless. Like the glint off Gideon's keys. Like the glare from the sidewalk under his dropped coffee. He can't get the moment out of his head. Like chasing a white whale.

"Garcia, how did you find this?" asks Morgan. Reid feels him lean over, body blocking the glare, evening out the light. He closes his eyes and dips his head down, digging thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets, feeling his pulse thrum to his temple.

Dragging his lips together, he fights against the sudden urge to ask, _where's Hotch? _

"I was going through the gallery information, searching for cross reference points, and I started to think we were overlooking the obvious," answers Garcia. "All those drawings this guy's been leaving—though it pains me to give him the title, our creepo is an artist. And you mentioned Breckenridge was a place he's coming back to, so, I decided to cross reference the tenant list with past entries in the Breckenridge art festival."

"The tenant space is meant for festival participants," says JJ. "Wouldn't most of them have entries in the festival?"

"You are correct. Most of them did. However, the painting you see before you is not from the festival. When nothing stood out, I widened the cross reference to include any and all art displays I could find. This painting was in a collection of student works from the University of Denver, displayed in Breckenridge in 1994, or so says the provenance."

Morgan straightens, letting the glare crash down over Reid's head again. "What's the tenant's name, Garcia?"

"Hank Miller. But it's probably not his real name. No Hank Millers were registered students that year, in art or otherwise. No Hanks, no Henrys."

Reid looks up, wrinkling his eyebrows.

"Reid," says Morgan. "That mean something to you?"

"No." He starts to shake his head then shifts his mouth. "I… I don't know. Maybe. There was an artist and a novelist named Henry Miller who died in 1980. The unsub would probably know that."

"_Tropic of Cancer_," Morgan says, nodding. "I read it. But Miller didn't paint stuff like this."

"No, he didn't. Some of his writings were accused of being too sexually explicit, but not like... not like this. When his novels were published they created a lot of controversy but were ultimately considered groundbreaking. There was a lot of reaction from the public. Maybe by using a derivative of the name the unsub was trying to provoke a similar reaction. The anonymity of the alias would give him power, but absolve him of personal responsibility if someone recognized it as a confession."

"Stay in the shadows, watch the panic around you," Morgan growls, rubbing a hand over his chin.

Behind him, Reid hears JJ move closer. He turns to look at her and sees she has her arms folded and is staring at the screen. When Morgan joins Reid in looking, she finally glances up. "We should get this off the laptop," she says. "I think the chief has a plasma we can connect to." Stepping back, she moves towards the door.

"Wait," says Morgan. "Grab Emily too. See if she's been able to find out anything about Hank Miller from the Poes."

JJ nods, moving to the door.

Reid blinks as the light splits around her exit, casting unstable blue and green shadows over the floor. He tightens the set of his teeth and blinks again.

The hallucinations should be over. They should be done. It's a rational thought that runs jagged against the rest of his mind. The past keeps getting stuck on him. Old voices. Old fears. But it's all opaque. Like he's picking up warring radio waves between a mountain and a valley. Memories crossing and stuttering over each other, even though the message seems the same.

Nothing just gets erased.

He spends so much of his time telling himself his worst fears are just fears but all of them are proven true.

_Spencer, I knew it would be you…_

_I knew._

It all leads to the same end. He loses. It's just a matter of time before he loses again.

_Choose one to die._

He is starting to feel like this will never go away.

Tying his fingers together he turns away from the door, from the unstable shadows, and looks at Morgan, who is watching him.

When Morgan finally speaks, it's to Garcia. "Hey, hot stuff, we're going to need everything else you can find out about this painting."

"Way ahead of you," she answers.

"We need to call Hotch," says Reid, meeting Morgan's gaze.

\

Rossi is beyond the vehicles, around the corner into the lee of the building when he finally sees the light. Faint. Coming through buckled glass at the top of a short stairway. In the sudden stillness of his position he hears the faded sound of a steel guitar cutting down to him.

Sighing, he turns off his flashlight.

The steps are solid, but the door creaks as Rossi moves inside. The interior is all wood paneling and dim lighting. The music becomes easier to hear, but not by much. The compressed tones are playing out from a vintage-styled jukebox set next to a long bar. Nine barstools. All empty. A draft sits on the counter.

Down at the far end, at a table near the corner, with his back to the window, Gideon doesn't even look surprised to see him. Like he's been sitting there, just waiting for someone old and familiar to walk through the door. Like it was always expected.

The lack of caution in his seating choice tells Rossi everything else he needs to know.

* * *

tbc


	17. Chapter 17

**Part 17**

* * *

Hotch isn't answering his phone.

Neither is Rossi.

The calls keep going straight to voicemail, as though the phones are occupied, or off, or out of range. Morgan tightens his grip around his cell and presses it to his forehead. He doesn't like the possibilities. He respects Hotch. He trusts him. Most of the time. More than he trusts most people. But right now, it all feels wrong. The seams are coming undone. They shouldn't have done it this way. They should have stayed together.

A rattle-smack echoes into the hallway. Morgan glances to where Prentiss is connecting the rolling plasma outside the conference room, just out of view from the rest of the station. A toppled container of paperclips sits next to her feet, having been banged off the desk Reid is leaning against. Morgan watches as JJ stops Reid from leaning down, retrieves the box herself, and sets it back on the desk's edge before returning to the humming fax machine.

It all looks so normal.

Then, there's the rest of it. Chad and Delia Poe talking quietly to each other near the chief's office. The kids from the coffee shop sitting on an empty desk, looking anxious and bored both. A group of police officers standing near the television, watching the statement being given to the national press by their colleague. All them waiting. Strangers, hunkered in a bunker.

It's the tension that undermines it. Morgan isn't sure if he's projecting or absorbing, but it's bleeding over everything. So thick, they'll be scrubbing it from under their fingernails long after this is over.

"Morgan," says Prentiss. "We're up. JJ's getting Garcia back on video link."

Breathing out, he pockets his phone, and starts towards the plasma.

The painting eclipses the screen. The girl stretched out like an offering to the gods. With color and dimension. If he touched her face he thinks maybe he would feel her skin. It sharpens the rock in his gut. They're close. The pieces are going to fall into place. He's just not sure it will happen fast enough.

Prentiss meets him halfway to the others and shares his expression. "Delia never met Hank Miller," she says. "Chad did, but didn't interact with him much. He describes him as a nice man, and a quiet tenant. He said he looked familiar, like he'd seen him before, but he couldn't say where. Miller told him he used to spend summers here, and was now looking to move to the area. He was in the apartment less than a week. That's all they know."

Morgan sighs. "It's more than we had before."

"Yeah, and based on what JJ filled me in on, I think we can be reasonably sure that at some point he _was_ actually associated with the University of Denver. Garcia's working on a student and teacher list, but I'm thinking we don't have that kind of time."

"And I'm thinking, when we do find him, he'll have killed a lot more than seven. You don't get to this level of organization without a lot of history behind you. If that painting was displayed in 1994, he's been at this for a while, without the same level of theatrics. What changed for this guy? What brought him back here?"

"Mid-life crisis?" says Prentiss.

"Maybe," Morgan returns, rubbing his neck. "Did we get a physical description?"

Prentiss nods at the Poe's position. "They're doing a sketch for us. Any luck getting Hotch?"

Morgan glances briefly towards Reid then shakes his head. "Not yet," he says.

\

It's the second cabin that shows Hotch what he's been looking for. What Reid's been looking for. The stairs are worn. The door is unlocked. The glow of a dim lamp tips light out the window. The atmosphere bleeds with familiarity, and emptiness, and reminds him of returning home to find Jack and Haley gone elsewhere. Hollow cutouts where they used to be.

The sense memory moves through his nerves. Haley and Gideon gone the same night. Hotch remaining, trying to be the stability for two families, thinking he'd failed as much as he'd succeeded.

The light switch he flips sets a brighter glow overhead, revealing a bed, and a chest, and two chairs by a back door. Near them, the semblance of a kitchen.

On the north wall there is something else. Hung by strings down the wooden planks are pictures he can recognize. All the victims Gideon had saved, all the pictures once held in frames across his office.

Hotch holsters his weapon, stepping closer, running a smooth finger across the outside edge of Tracy Bell. There is nothing else personal in the whole cabin.

It is a ghost who lives here.

\

One does not stop being a profiler, Rossi thinks. Even within the team. As much as they talk about not profiling each other, they do. Some of the time, they stay silent about what they see. Sometimes, they see too much. The details become an unavoidable part of how they view the world. And one does not simply… stop.

Not like Gideon.

He can see it in Gideon's eyes. In the loose way he holds the drink in front of him. The purposeful lack of affect. Of intent. A reversed kind of vigilance.

Rossi moves forward. The floorboards under his feet are worn, dusted with trace amounts of peanut shells, quiet and smooth. Standing in the hedged glow of the rustic fixture over Gideon's table, he waits.

They are the inverts of each other, and he feels it now more than ever. Gideon's demons drove him away. Rossi's demons drove him back. Neither one of them expected to end up where they are now. Rossi left. Gideon stayed. That was how it should have remained.

They were friends once, of a sort. Rossi doesn't know what that means now.

"You look like hell," says Gideon, the corner of his lip going up, the familiarity of the expression sending Rossi all the way back to the beginning of their existence in a flash. There'd been fewer lines on Gideon's face back then, but he'd always smiled like that.

This time, the smile is counterfeit. Polite. It does not reach the rest of his face. His eyes are full of ghosts. "How's the BAU?" Gideon says next. "Learning to be a team player?"

Rossi ignores the implications and sits down, facing the tall window, facing Gideon, vigilant and aware in the way Gideon is not. "They miss you," he says bluntly. "They don't talk about you."

"That's okay," returns Gideon, tapping a finger at the base of his drink. "I don't talk about them either."

\

"Could this be a real location?" asks Prentiss, leaning on the desk next to Reid.

"Hard to say," Reid mumbles, moving a hand into the air, as if his fingers can help form his thoughts. "Art can be about both honesty and deception, reality and fantasy. For the unsub, the painting would likely represent elements of both. It'd be difficult to decipher which."

It feels weird to hear him speak. Prentiss keeps expecting his voice to sound hollow. Distant. Like his expression. "What about the crest on the tomb?" she says. "Can we trace that?"

"I can try to isolate the image," says Garcia. "I might be able to cross reference something from there, but it's a long shot."

"Garcia," JJ inserts. "Can you put the locations from the provenance on a map for us?"

Morgan turns. "You got something?"

"Maybe," she answers, peering down at the copy she'd pulled off the fax machine, eyebrows twitched inward.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure. I can do that," Garcia says. Within moments, the map pixilates onto the screen.

Reid shuffles upright, folding his arms across his torso.

"Now," continues JJ, still looking at the paper, "can you add the locations of our team over the last… five years?"

Garcia pauses, as though not comprehending. "Yes," she finally says. "Yes, I can do that too." She glances down, punching keys before looking up again. "I'm not going to like this, am I?"

The map updates, dots materializing over the others. Not exact, but close.

Prentiss trades a wary look with Morgan.

"What does it mean?" asks Garcia.

"From what I can tell, nearly everywhere the painting's been, we've been there too," answers JJ, handing Morgan the printout. "The painting shows up after we do. Sometimes weeks, sometimes months, but there."

Morgan holds the paper tensely in his fingers. "He's been tracking us," he says.

\

"Nice place," comments Rossi, gesturing out the dark window. "A little run down."

"Colorado," shrugs Gideon without turning around. "Always nice."

"You left it in Sylvia's maiden name."

Gideon smiles benignly. "She hated fishing. Never set foot here. Neither did Steven."

"Good place to retire then, I guess."

"Not bad."

"Tucked away, secluded," Rossi continues. "No friends. No family. You don't read newspapers. You don't watch television. Completely off the grid. How's that working out for you?"

"Better than you'd think," says Gideon, meeting Rossi's eyes fully for the first time.

A whispering cough bends out from the jukebox as the disk changes. The song that starts to play is so similar to the last one, Rossi can't tell the difference. The bartender has re-emerged—a woman in her forties with a black ponytail and no make-up. She pulls the draft off the counter, delivering it and a plate of fries to the father and son on the other side of the room. Walking back behind the bar, she glances warily over, then away.

Gideon's expression doesn't even flicker. Staying still. Stone and static.

Rossi tilts his head to the side. "Afraid of what you'll see if you look at anything too closely? Or is this a self-imposed exile?"

Gideon taps his drink again, curling his fingers around the base. "Is that what you want to know, Dave? Is that why you're here?"

\

"The display locations are primarily in places where investigations were conducted into major serial killers," says Morgan, scanning the copy in his hand. "Florida. St. Louis. Even a few that weren't so publicized." He's got his elbow hooked on top of a filing cabinet, hand pressed to his forehead.

"Why would the unsub do that? Was he wanting someone to notice?" asks Prentiss.

"No one would notice this," says Reid, waving at the map. "It's too subtle."

Morgan removes his hand from his head and taps the paper. "Maybe it's a personal statement. He sees his killing as art. Maybe he's paying homage to the other artists."

"Or gloating that he hasn't been caught yet," adds Prentiss. "Affirmation to himself that he's better than all of them."

"But it's not just locations with serial killings," says JJ. "It's locations with serial killings we've been called in to investigate. It is us he's been tracking. He's been following us for a while."

Prentiss shifts her heel against the base of the desk. "Can we tell where it starts?"

JJ shakes her head. "Ten years? Maybe more."

"None of us were in the BAU ten years ago," says Prentiss.

"Hotch was," counters Reid, twisting his fingers back under his elbows.

Prentiss watches him for a moment, then looks at Morgan and opens her mouth, feeling the shift of blood up to her head. "Are we saying he's been tracking Hotch?"

JJ glances away from the map to the exit Hotch and Rossi left through, lifting two fingers to her forehead as she faces forward again. The wind outside has become invisible in the darkness, but the howl of it can be heard through the doorjamb.

Morgan steps away from the cabinet. Turning the paper in his hands, he finally speaks, drawing their attention. "I can't tell where it starts, but I think I can tell where it ends." Approaching the map, scanning the surface, he points to Milwaukee. "Here. This is the last place the painting shows up. On display for less than two weeks."

"That's our starting point," says Prentiss. "That's where things changed for the unsub. What happened in Milwaukee?"

"Milwaukee," Reid mumbles. A second later he looks up, eyes startled, opening his mouth, then closing it.

"Reid, what is it?" asks Morgan.

"Gideon," he stammers. "Gideon retired. It's not just Hotch who was on the team back then, it was Gideon. The unsub wasn't studying us, he was studying him. Gideon… Gideon's here."

\

Rossi shifts his elbows onto the table, breaking the mirror of Gideon's pose. "The unsub who brought us here, brought us to this place for a reason," he says.

Gideon shakes his head, looking away, waving a hand.

Leaning forward, Rossi persists. "The unsub who brought us here has taken three women from this area."

Gideon's eyes return. "SSA Rossi," he says slowly, steadily. "Whatever brought you here. I am no longer an agent of the BAU. I can't help you."

Rossi sits back, leaving his abraded hands light on the table's surface, the scab down his thumb dark and raw. "Reid saw you. Yesterday. Coming out of the Simon Francis exhibit at the West Sun Gallery."

Gideon's face doesn't change, but his eyes shadow momentarily.

"Twelve minutes later," Rossi presses on, "he was in the hospital, unconscious, and we didn't know if he would wake up again. Would you like to know why?"

The expression finally shifts, the counterfeit of neutrality instantly gone.

"He's awake," Rossi assures. "I wouldn't say he's okay, but he's awake."

* * *

tbc


	18. Chapter 18

**Part 18**

* * *

Morgan steps over to the laptop and kicks the chair out from the desk as he shifts the screen around. "Okay, Garcia, we need to know, where did Hotch and Rossi go?"

On the computer, Garcia looks blank for a second. "Did you try calling them?"

Morgan shakes his head, digging his hands tighter around the desk's edge. "They're not picking up. We need them back here. If this unsub has any reason to target Hotch more than the rest of us, we need him back here now. We need to know where they are."

"I don't know where they went."

"Garcia."

"Rossi didn't tell me. That's not what he talked to me about."

"Okay," Prentiss cuts in. "What did he need from you?"

"Property records," she answers. "He wanted to know how to look into property records, and if they'd be stored in a central location he could access."

"Property records?" says JJ. "Why?"

"He didn't say."

Morgan pushes back, hooking a hand behind his neck. "Did you find anything for him?"

"He didn't want me to. He just wanted to know how."

"Okay." Morgan thumbs the bridge of his nose, trying to organize all the pieces in his mind. _Find the unsub, find Hotch, find…_ "Okay, Garcia, before, when Hotch asked you to find Gideon—you didn't find _anything_?"

"Nothing," she says. "Except…" She slides back from the screen, focus wavering. "There is maybe one thing. I didn't think it was relevant at the time."

"What do you have?"

"It's not going to help find Hotch or Rossi," she warns.

"Tell us anyway."

"When Hotch asked me to look for him, I did a broad search cross-referencing _Colorado_ and _Jason Gideon_ just to see what came up. According to the Breckenridge Gazette, Gideon was speaking at a law enforcement conference in Breckenridge in 1994."

"While the painting was on display?"

"Yes."

Morgan closes his eyes, letting the dots connect. It doesn't need to be said aloud again, but he looks at Reid anyway, expression locked for a long second. "You really did see Gideon," he finally says. "Gideon is here."

Reid nods. His face is pale, the tremble in his fingers suddenly more apparent. "Gideon's here," he repeats.

\

A brush of movement and a shadow in the corner of Rossi's vision make him turn enough to glance over his shoulder. Hotch is standing back from their table, waiting.

"Aaron," says Gideon, something unreadable in the undertow of his voice.

Hotch steps forward. Unzipping his jacket, he pulls the file he's been carrying and slides it across the table.

Gideon's hands twitch as he looks down at it.

"The unsub we're trying to identify knows who you are," Hotch says to Gideon. "He knows you're here, and he's been trying to get your attention."

Gideon looks up.

"He's targeting us," continues Hotch. "The whole team. He nearly killed Reid and he's not finished. Additionally, there are three women who are going to lose their lives, tonight, if we don't find them. And for all we know, he could have followed us here."

"Jason," says Rossi. "Try as you might to shut it off, you don't just stop being a profiler. You know him. You've seen him."

"He would have talked to you," adds Hotch. "A comment about one of your books. Hints that he knew you'd retired, or that he was familiar with your work in the BAU. You know who it is. We need you to identify him."

There is a long, brittle pause.

Tentatively touching the file's surface, Gideon drags it closer, fingers bled white under the surface of his nails.

With a final glance upward, and like he's preparing to enter a pool of ice, he takes a shallow breath. All is frozen. Then he opens the folder and dives in.

\

_Gideon's here_, Reid thinks. _Gideon's here_. He leans elbows on knees and runs fingers into his hair, raw palms pressed to his forehead. He'd thought the answer to that question would have taken the rest of everything else away. Put his thoughts back into place. Reorder his memory. Take away the holes. But it doesn't. He feels numb. The whispering of leaves in his ears won't go away.

_Only one bullet in that gun, boy…_

_Only one…_

In his head, he hears his father slamming the door, a dozen times repeated. He feels the cold earth under his knees as he tries to dig his own grave and then the juddering of his mother's wood floor as he tries to clean her spilled paint. It's all jumbling together. He's going backward instead of forward—with color and glare and out-of-place voices.

_Reid, if you're watching, you're not responsible for this…_

Maybe he's going crazy anyway.

_And he that curseth his father… or his mother…_

_And he that curseth…_

"I'm working on the GPS from Rossi's phone," Garcia says, as though from somewhere far away. "The storm must be interfering or they are seriously out of range. They're south of you. That's the best I can tell."

"Keep working on it," orders Morgan.

"If this guy knew who Gideon was back then," says Prentiss, "he would have included the painting in the student display specifically hoping Gideon would see it."

"How would he even know Gideon would go to the art exhibit?" asks JJ.

Morgan speaks again, voice rolling over Reid's head in a metallic tinged echo, words from a tin can mounted high above him. "Gideon probably didn't," he says. "But, classic narcissist, the unsub believed he would. Maybe even believes he did. If Breckenridge is so important, maybe he even saw Gideon here, walking around town. To him, it would have been the start of a relationship. Gideon would be his ultimate art critic. He follows Gideon's career, follows the BAU, planning for the day they meet. Then, Gideon retires, and our unsub loses the chance to tell him what he's done—have his work appreciated."

"That's how we ignored him," says Prentiss. "That's why this is personal."

_Everything's personal_, Reid thinks.

Tobias Hankel as Rafael is in his head, holding out a bullet. _Do you know what this is? _

_It's God's will._

He feels Gideon's grip, tight and steady on his shoulder while the blood from Nathan Harris's slit wrists dries sticky on his palms, and can't match it to the rest of his thoughts.

_Choose, and prove you'll do God's will._

Reid slides his hands down his forehead until his palms are covering his eye sockets, tips of his nails digging into his hairline.

_I choose…_

_I choose… _

_Aaron Hotchner._

\

"The locations where he leaves the drawings," mumbles Gideon, more in to himself than out, as though he's not really speaking to them. His voice is low and tinged with rust. Like a waking hinge. "Esoteric. Places for artists, writers, students."

Hotch moves his elbows onto the knotted pine surface, watching him. He hasn't lost weight. He hasn't gained weight. Expression thin. Eyes distant. Dark steady wrinkle between his eyebrows. All as it was.

The lighting over the table is low, changing the depth of shading in the case copies spread beneath it.

"He's telling us he's unique. He's uncommon," Gideon continues, talking to the paper. He pulls one of the drawings closer, and looks at the notes written in the file. "He's an artist. And what good is art without an audience truly capable of appreciating his work?" His fingers hover over one of the papers, but his focus isn't on what he's touching.

"Jason?" prompts Hotch.

The expression that meets him when Gideon peers up is familiar, whispering of the past in a way Hotch doesn't have time to contemplate. Illusions and disillusions. They're all in that expression. Seeing Gideon here. Not as a ghost, but disappeared, just the same. He'd known Gideon many years, and he still doesn't know what it was all about. The sudden absence. The empty space.

"I know this place," says Gideon, turning the paper around. "The coffee shop in town."

Rossi leans forward. "Have you been in there often?"

"Two… maybe three times at the beginning of the summer," Gideon says. "Lots of fishing brochures. Good pastries. Girl behind the counter gave me a coffee on the house."

Hotch moves his eyes to Rossi's then back again. "Did you talk about anything else?" he asks.

"To anyone else?" adds Rossi.

Gideon glances down, pulling another copy closer, scanning over the notes on the profile. Hotch can see his eyes sifting back through his memory.

"Business was slow," he answers, half a shrug under the words. "We chatted. She gave me a schedule for events in town—classes, gallery showings. I told her I'd met Simon Francis in a physics lecture, before he started painting."

"The condition of human perspective?" Rossi says, as though he and Gideon had discussed the topic before.

"Physics magic," Gideon clarifies. "Reid would have liked him."

The feeling of familiarity intensifies. Hotch drags a picture into his mind of Reid then, and Reid now, and wonders what Gideon would see in him.

"No one else was in the shop?" presses Rossi. "Any of the times you went in?"

Brushing a thumb over the paper's edge, Gideon tilts his head to the side, eyes closing.

Hotch taps a hand to his mouth, then folds it down on the table.

"Eastport Tree Farms," Gideon answers, opening his eyes a moment later. "There was a customer. He said he'd grown up working Eastport Tree Farms out of Blue River, but that his true passion was art. He said… he said most artists are appreciated too late." Looking up, meeting Hotch's gaze squarely, Gideon adds the last piece. "Then he said… he said in my profession, I probably knew that already."

"Eastport Tree Farms," Hotch repeats, shifting back and standing. "That's where they are. That's where he's taken them."

Rossi follows, pulling his phone. "No signal," he says. "We can call the team from the road."

"Hotch," says Gideon, smoke and vapor and disuse in his voice.

Hotch stops, looking over his shoulder at the conflict on Gideon's face, at the hesitant hand hovering over the folded cardstock on the table.

"He's planning for me. I'm coming with you."

"I have an extra weapon in the car," Hotch answers succinctly, already moving.

* * *

tbc

* * *

_Disclaimer regarding Simon Francis:_ Simon Francis is a real person and a real painter (and a real former physics lecturer). I have never met him, but I do enjoy his work. Using a real person in fanfic (even just as a reference) is a very fine line for me. Ultimately, I felt the themes Francis works with were themes that gave me a good undertone to some of the character interactions, and backlit a few things I needed for the character of Gideon and his current mindset, so I decided to use the actual person in an abstract way, hopefully in a way that brought no disrespect to the artist. My interpretation of his themes, and of his vaguely mentioned works, are my own and are not meant to speak for Simon Francis. I'm only hypothesizing how these fictional characters would respond to his work. We clear?

And also: Happy Birthday _Chand Aur Roshani._ ;)


	19. Chapter 19

**Part 19**

* * *

"Hotch," says Morgan. "Hotch, I can't hear you."

"Cell phone garble," Garcia mumbles from the laptop behind him. "I still can't get a fix on their location."

"Hotch," Morgan growls again, plugging one ear, trying to press closer to the fuzzed-over voice in the other. "Say again?"

_"…Reid… not… at the Station… ten…" _

A staticky hiss has Morgan wincing and ducking his head away. "Hotch, you're cutting out," he says, bringing the cell back to his ear. "Where are you?"

_"Team… back… split… wait… Eastp… Rive… Eastport Tre… Farms. Eastport…"_

"Hotch? Hotch." The phone beeps in Morgan's ear. When he looks at the screen, _call lost_ is blinking across the surface. "Damn it." He turns to JJ. "Can we try to get them on radio?"

"Radios are out," she says. "Wind took out two of the masts."

"Why would our luck change now?" he mutters. "Alright. Garcia, Hotch was saying something about Eastport Farms. You got anything on that?"

"Is that where the unsub is, or where they are?" asks Prentiss.

"Couldn't tell," says Morgan.

Four feet to Morgan's left, Reid drops his hands away from his eyes, and sits straight. Darkness is drawn under his eye sockets, shadowed black against the pallor of his skin.

"I have an Eastport Tree Farms," Garcia says. "Located out of Blue River. Not currently in operation… titled to a… Gregory… Gregory Hanks. Gregory Hanks. Formerly to Janice and Edward Hanks." The sound of the working keyboard rolls over her voice as it speeds up. "Hanks was a student at the University of Denver. Perfect score on his ACT. Genius IQ. Double major in art and criminology… dropped out. He does not show up at any public school in the area as a juvenile… I'm guessing home school or boarding school… and he has not been on the grid since he left Denver. Not under that name, anyway. It's going to take me a bit longer to pull anything else, but this is it, right? Hanks. This is him?"

Morgan reaches for his service weapon, checking the clip. "This is him," he agrees. He looks at JJ. "We still have state agents on standby. We need to put in the call."

JJ starts to open her mouth.

"Wait," says Prentiss. "Someone has to stay with Reid."

Reid flattens his hand against the desk, pushing to his feet. "No. I'm going."

Morgan starts to rock his head, but Reid moves, reaching for his jacket.

"Reid." Morgan steps in front of him, trying to switch gears, hands easy on his arms, avoiding the bandaged gash. Reid's body feels cold, even through the shirt. Fragilely thin. The shaking Morgan told himself he'd been halfway imagining vibrates into his palms. It makes him scared, the way Reid feels in his hands. "Reid, you can't go."

Reid stands stiff, and won't look at Morgan's face.

"Hey, listen to me," Morgan says, tightening his grip just slightly, keeping contact as he shifts Reid back down to the chair and sits across from him. "Listen to me. You're going to be alright, but right now, you're not okay. You can't go. I need you here."

Reid finally lifts his eyes, stark and shadowed, drawing his elbows in closer to his stomach.

Morgan eases the press of his fingers but keeps his hold. The smooth planes of Reid's face are like white paper and Morgan suddenly can't remember the last time they had a case this bad. He thinks it was a long time ago. A long long time ago. A million years. A million miles.

His voice darkens. "Reid. I need you _here_."

Reid blinks, and after a second, dips his head in a shallow nod. "I know," he says. The admittance sounds like an ache. Morgan flashes back 32 hours, hearing Reid say, _Gideon,_ with confusion_. I just didn't expect to see him._

And, _I don't need a hospital. _

And the massive collapse that had happened next.

Morgan holds Reid's arms a moment longer, trying to gauge his face. "Okay," he finally says, shifting his grip up to Reid's shoulder as he stands, meeting the eyes of JJ and Prentiss over Reid's head.

"I'll stay," says Prentiss, reading Morgan's look. "I'll update the sheriff when he gets back from The Douglass—make sure the families are kept out of this until we know more." It's JJ's job she's describing, but Morgan nods anyway, stepping away from the chair, reaching again for his weapon.

JJ's expression stops him. Hesitation on her face. Something tense behind her eyes.

"JJ," he prompts.

"Guys," Garcia cuts in, voice needle thin through the strain. "One more thing. I'd guess Eastport Tree Farms is where Hotch and Rossi are currently headed. Not where they currently are. It is located in Blue River, about ten minutes south of you. Hotch's cell pinged off a tower headed in that direction."

Morgan nods. "Then that's where we head too."

A sudden crash of paper smacks loudly to the right. Morgan turns his head to see a stack of files scattered over the floor, toppled under the edge of the desk. He stares for a second, trying to figure out the cause, then drags a breath, spinning quickly to see Reid's back disappear through the exit.

"Reid," says Prentiss, shaking her head, already headed towards the door.

Morgan shoves his jacket to the side. The keys to the SUV are missing. Pushing off the desk he follows Prentiss out, JJ beside him. Both of them just in time to see the SUV bump out of the parking lot.

In the wailing wind over the dark asphalt, Prentiss opens her mouth like she wants to say something, but nothing comes out.

Bending his head, Morgan runs a hand over the top of it, then turns and bangs his fist into the wall.

It's not as if he doesn't understand. It's not as if he didn't see what Reid was pushing through. He should have seen this coming. Because this is more than abandonment issues. This is more than Reid struggling to prove himself to a living ghost. This is Reid wanting to prove himself to himself.

This is about not losing what you still had.

\

The buzz of his cell phone rumbles across the seat. Reid doesn't need to look down to see Morgan's name printed on the screen and he ignores it.

The cut on his arm is pulsing. His knuckles around the steering wheel feel raw, like he's been knocking on doors that won't open. Looking for people who are already gone.

The phone buzzes again. Reid loses the map in his head and looks down. It isn't Morgan. It's Garcia. He ticks his fingers towards it, letting loose the wheel for a second. Like instinct.

"Reid," says Garcia, raspy static over her voice. "Morgan wants you to turn around right now."

Reid swallows.

He heard what Morgan said, and he's not sure he's okay, either. He's still stuck in that moment, back on the sidewalk, back to _walking breathing moving_ Jason Gideon. And he can't move on until the images match something new. Until his brain is just his brain again and not a question. Until Hotch and Rossi and all of them are back in place and he doesn't have to worry about walls being the right color, or what the holes in his memory are hiding.

"Reid," Garcia repeats.

No pixilated paintings. No Bob Dylan scrolling through his head in notebooks. No dead girls with crossed hands. No voices. No ghosts.

He reaches out to cut the connection, and presses the phone all the way off.

He's thinking he doesn't want to be part of the repetition. He doesn't want to be sitting in any more empty cabins, reading the last notes of those who leave. Knocking on doors that don't open, absence in the wake.

He wants to feel like not everything he touches will tarnish. Not everything he believes in will end. Not everything will burn.

And he's thinking of Henry Miller. The real Henry Miller. One line of text pushing to the surface. _Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring… _

_…through obeying the blind urge._

* * *

tbc

* * *

And... to be very clear, in case I confused anyone else about this (I knew I would end up confusing someone, dang it), and because I don't want it to be a point of confusion in any way, shape, or form: Simon Francis is not the unsub. Not even a little bit. Nor is the real Henry Miller... which I probably should have done a disclaimer about as well. Any questions?


	20. Chapter 20

Maybe a mild warning for imagery on this one. Really, not anything that hasn't been alluded to in the story already, and there is nothing exactly explicit, but I feel to put it out there.

* * *

**Part 20**

* * *

Thunder breaks overhead. Sounding closer. Louder. Like boulders being dumped across the roof. Quick and kinetic. Culled against the motionless police house. Mocking.

The air inside the station is stale.

The two minutes since Reid left have turned into two centuries.

The desk under Morgan's fists feels like a barrier. The walls like a prison. A world caught in slow motion. Everything shifting in half-timed beats. Like ticker tape. But when Morgan looks up, Emily finally has keys in her hand, and JJ is standing next to her.

"Back up?" he asks.

JJ nods. "Gearing up. The chief is coordinating, but they'll wait for our signal. The hand radios will give us a five mile reception zone. Less in the storm, but it should be enough."

Morgan leans into his knuckles to rock himself straight, re-checking his weapon, already angling towards the exit. "Then give the signal. Let's go."

"Wait," says JJ, one hand gripping his arm, the brief pull like the lock of a steel restraint.

"JJ, we have to go."

"No. Wait." Her voice is solid, feet and expression stone steady. "The unsub's going to be ready for us."

Morgan starts to shake his head, then stops, sprinting back over her words. Catching the serious crease behind her eyes, he shifts to face her more fully, a sudden itch spiking under the skin at the back of his neck.

"Look, I don't know how Hotch connected the unsub to Eastport Farms," she continues. "But chances are, if we kept going, we would have too. The unsub is waiting for this. He used the name Hank Miller at the gallery when he didn't have to. He wanted us to find the painting. He wants us to figure this out."

Morgan feels the teeth click at the back of his jaw. He hears the hard beat of his blood thrum once in his ear, then a sharp silence.

"She's right," says Prentiss, meeting his eyes.

"I know," he answers. Loosening the grip on his gun, he turns his head, looking through the glass to the evidence board in the conference room. At the drawings. The crime scene photos. The profile notes and shifting patterns. "JJ," he says dully. "If you were to look back at Gideon's press coverage—not the serial killers he caught, but him, just him—where did he get the most attention?"

JJ follows his gaze to the board and back, the line between her eyes rigid and confused. "Adrian Bale," she says after a beat.

Prentiss looks at her too. "The agents who died in the Boston explosion," she says, nodding. "I remember. It was everywhere for months."

Morgan feels the hollow snap of dread stretch into his skin. Facing Prentiss, he re-adjusts the grip on his weapon. "We know now that Gideon is the missing piece in the profile. If we look again at everything our unsub's done with that piece in place, what does it tell us?"

Prentiss stands stationary, then starts a slow tilt to her head. "He's an organized sexual sadist," she begins, mouth lingering empty at the end, waiting for the remainder of words to converge. Morgan can see it when she reaches the same place he did. A subtle tightening in her shoulders. A dull depression of lines. She meets his look. "He's a sadist… not a bomber. He's not a bomber, but he used an explosive."

Hand pressed flat to her sternum, just below her neck, JJ breathes. "What does it mean?"

Morgan answers. "It means Gregory Hanks knows about Gideon's leave after he lost the agents in Boston to Adrian Bale's explosion, and he's not about to be out done by anyone. It means the explosive at the gallery isn't the only bomb he's set for us to find."

\

Reid's foot is locked against the gas pedal. Racing the sky. Like he can't drive fast enough. Like he is already too late, and this won't end well because of it.

Stacks of felled logs edge the dirt roadway, clustered in intervals between even rows of overgrown pine, becoming more haphazard the farther in he gets. The increasing chaos feels like a harbinger. Like the rough road to Gideon's cabin. Portend of nothing good. He stares straight as he drives, and tries to ignore it—tries not to think of cabins and cornfields, or dead girls already in the leaves.

The roll of a gun.

A dispassionate voice.

_Choose one to die._

His throat constricts. _I won't do it. _

Quick lines of lighting cast silent streaks across the windshield, gnashes of thunder following after. Under the scent of ozone, he catches the memory of burning fish guts and can't let it go.

He's just spotted Hotch and Rossi's vehicle, abandoned in the distance, when the sky breaks.

A furious rain.

Dragging the SUV to a stop, killing the lights and the engine, he's soaked before he even gets the door closed, nearly slipping in the mud as he does. He keeps hold of the car, standing abruptly still once he has his feet—hand pressed to the paneling, water running under the edge of his collar.

"Hotch," he mouths, breathing heavily. Everything is silent, except for the rain. Dead and quiet.

His eyes are slow to adjust to the dark. Through the shadowed maze of old logs, he finds the square outline of a sawmill, or a storage house—maybe both—standing solid to the north, rain bouncing off the roof.

He is in a lumberyard. Long unused. An excavation site. Like all that's left for him is to surface the bones. The rest of his thoughts are like loose threads following after. Tugged at until he can't keep the stitching from coming undone. Maybe the girls are already dead. Maybe Hotch. Maybe Rossi. Maybe everything that's happened here has already occurred, and both Gideon and this man will remain ghosts that will haunt the rest of them, and never again let them sleep.

_Abandon all hope, ye who enter here._

He coils his brain against the thoughts, but they persist, dancing in the same ugly loop as his mixed up memories. Pushing the drip of wet hair off his forehead, he presses his shoulder to a stack of neat wood, working slick, wavering fingers to draw his revolver. Marking the grey-shaded door, he moves again, slipping closer as he feels a drop in air pressure. For one short moment, the rain lets up. The whispering in his ears goes silent. Then, a burst of lightning claws lines across the sky, and under the angry moan of thunder, the whispering returns, trudging something new with it.

A wounded voice. Keenly human. Leeching into the dark.

Reid's lips go numb, locking down with the stampede on the nerve endings around his frozen lungs. Stuttering through two short breaths, he touches the door handle. Tentatively, then more determined. Twisting with his fingers, he stands to the side, pushing in with his foot, weapon aimed, undeviating.

Nothing.

There is nothing.

He is staring down an empty corridor. Or the facsimile of one. A wide pathway opens before him between walls of slotted shelves—crates stacked high with cut wood and folded canvass, propping up sheet after sheet of corrugated metal at the base. It stretches maze-like along the wall inside the building.

A dim glow from somewhere deeper in the storage house casts shadows through the interior.

Absurdly warm air reaches out to him and he follows.

The voice he heard from outside burns loud inside the building. A moan. A buried scream. Then silence.

Around a corner, the light coming through the shelves on the interior side of the corridor begins to stagger—like a fan blade is moving under the source in intervals, choppy stripes sliding through the wood and over the iron to dart across his toes. He squints, trying to see between the slats. He's edging around another corner into another oblique pathway when he feels the touch on his back—an arm over his shoulder, a hand on his mouth. The slice of panic is instantly dizzying, painful in his chest as he's hauled backwards, vision turning solid grey.

Crushed into a dark corner, back locked against a solid chest, a roar of sound invades his ears—Tobias Hankel bellowing behind his eyes, shoving a resonating tremor into his jaw muscle.

"Reid," says Hotch, low and steady into Reid's ear, the pale reflection of his knuckles catching the light as he holds his palm over Reid's mouth.

Reid stills, then drops his head back with a shaky-deep breath, feeling his temple brush the edge of Hotch's rough jaw. He closes his eyes for a moment. Morgan was right. He's not okay. He's not okay, and he's not even sure he's going to be, but he nods, lifting his head off Hotch's shoulder, feeling Hotch's hand dip away from his mouth. The air he tastes is clean, and that seems wrong. He knows what they're going to find here. He should be tasting death.

"Do you have your weapon?" Hotch asks quietly, voice stoic-calm. He doesn't comment on the way Reid is shaking, but the sensation of his heart beats mutely against Reid's shoulder blade and feels like a commentary all its own.

Nodding again, Reid flexes his grip, finding a better balance to his feet. Sawdust under his shoes. Damp itch in his eyebrow.

Hotch shifts, letting go and stepping to the side. "Stay behind me," he orders. "Do you understand?"

Reid jerks his chin down, then licks his lips. "Rossi?" he whispers with a voice that sounds like it belongs to another person.

"Around the other side," answers Hotch. He doesn't ask about the others, seeming to have deduced that Reid has come alone. He turns left, into the flickering light, then stops, staring back. The shadows on his face are all wrong. Distorted. "Reid, he knows we're here. I need your head in this."

Reid digs cold knuckles into his eye socket and nods, wondering suddenly if the stutter of light over Hotch's face is real, or in his mind. Underneath it, he hears the sound of a tapping pen, and that seems wrong too. He opens his mouth. "His name is Gregory Hanks," he says quietly, running his eyes in towards the core of the building, seeing a shard of movement there through the slats. "He wants…"

"Gideon," Hotch finishes. He holds on Reid's face, then looks the other way. The cry has come again. A stilted wauler.

Four more steps and the light evens within their pathway to show more distinct shapes. A flash of dirt-blond hair. Two-day scruff. Loose jeans. Booted feet. A man pacing casually through the open center beyond the crated shelves.

"You wanted us here," Rossi's voice abruptly echoes, somewhere out of view on the other side of the warehouse. "We're here."

The pacing stops.

Through the wood staging, next to the pacing man, Reid makes out three stone boxes, platformed off the floor. Custom carved. Tombs. Like in the painting. Fear sounding from within, as though wired to a speaker. A shiver sticks its way under his wet hair and presses down the sudden sensation that he should conserve air.

"I don't think so, Agent Rossi," bleeds a relaxed voice. "You're not him. See, I'm pretty sure you've figured it out by now—they don't come out of the boxes unless it's him."

"Who's him?" Rossi questions.

Reid rubs knuckles below his twitching eye, bending lower, angling for a better view between the planks. The stone coffins are evenly spaced. Under the light. Like a presentation. A shell game. Or a magic trick.

_Reid, I need your head in this,_ he hears again, distinctly, but when he glances over, Hotch hasn't said anything.

"Come on now. You wouldn't be here without him. I planned it that way."

"Did you?" says Rossi. "Don't know what to tell you. I don't know who you're talking about."

Steadying his hand over the rough board in front of him, Reid feels splinters bite into his palm. A magic trick, he thinks again. _Look this way_. _Where will I be next?_ "He's directing us," he whispers.

Hotch stares at him.

"Drawing our attention," Reid explains, easing back from the slats. "This whole time, he keeps telling us where he wants us to look, and we've followed. We're only seeing what he wants us to see, when he wants us to see it. We're not looking where we really should."

Hotch's expression is sharp, and he steps back also, turning quietly to stare around them.

A frustrated laugh ricochets to the ceiling. "You really want to play pretend, Agent Rossi?" says Hanks. "Agent. Gideon. I'm talking about Agent Gideon."

"Jason?" Rossi throws back, indifferently. "He had better things to do. He's moved on. No good reason for him to stay."

Reid digs at his eye, crushing the lashes, working a coarse swallow over the taste of metal on his teeth.

"I can tell when someone's lying, Agent Rossi. Can't you?"

"Then listen to my voice. He's not here. I've only come for the girls."

"I'll say this one more time. He has to be here. They don't come out, unless he's here."

Reid looks at the stone coffins again, then at Hotch. Hotch is staring upwards at the strip of bare wall above the pallet racking. Reid sees the silver glint of wire tubing and follows it down at the same time Hotch does, looking for the connecting switch that will turn on the overhead lights. Hotch moves, patting a hand softly between the slats on the back wall until he locates the source. With a steadying glance at Reid, he pulls the cover and hits the light switch. A barrage of bright white fills the building, washing away the staggered silhouettes, but it's the painting that catches Reid off guard. Flooded over the entire south wall under a row of high bay lights are images of faces and bodies, visible even through the crates. Paintings of girls with eyes closed. Arms crossed. Shuttered out of reality. Jaggedly lined together in a Picasso-like mural. Victim after victim after victim.

Wires are spread in wide parallel lines down the whole of it. Connected in pockets to something that looks like c-4.

His hands go cold.

A moment later an angry voice charges towards them. "_No_."

Reid hears the growl, but he's not fast enough to dodge the movement in his periphery—the rushing approach to the other side of the pallet racking, nor the strong shove to the crates. He trips back as the shelving tips, fragments breaking into his skin as he scrambles out of the way. The entire section of shelving in front of them hits the wall with the force of a thunderclap. In the splinter-crash of wood and canvass, he watches Hotch go down under the debris.

Dragging air, Reid makes it to his feet, crawling out of the mess just as a fist hooks into his shirt. He makes one attempt to jerk away, but a line of ragged fingernails are jugged into his collarbone. The click of a gun grates right behind his left ear.

_Do you know what this is? __It's God's will._

* * *

tbc


	21. Chapter 21

**Part 21**

* * *

It is in slow motion that everything happens next. The warped feeling of being under water. Sound and sensation all out of proportion.

The tall posts once framing the pallet shelves are bent against the wall where the power switch had been—where Hotch had been standing. Like trees off their stumps, stripped of their branches. Splintered but solid. At their base, the shattered remains of broken planks and crushed crates are clumped haphazardly, like undergrowth.

Reid can see Hotch's sleeve mixed in with the destruction. He can see the dark color of Hotch's hair, clear but dusty, beneath a ripped twist of canvas, and can't blink away from it.

He feels dizzy as he stares—wobbling between right-side up and upside down, half of him there, half of him gone—the last solid thing pulled from under his feet.

_Hotch._

Rossi's voice resonates somewhere in the distance as Reid is dragged backwards against Hanks' body, then into that open center space with the stone coffins. Like he's being dragged to the center of a stage. The wrenched grip grates into the gash on the back of his arm. He feels a new surge of blood, warm on the skin below the wound.

Twisting his head, he tries to keep Hotch in his view.

Hanks is shouting something back at Rossi, right in Reid's ear, but it sounds muffled and far away, indecipherable, hidden under the now perpetual whispering of dead leaves. Like those leaves will be the last rumblings Reid will ever hear. Like he has never stopped hearing them. Like he has never stopped digging his own grave. Every sound is encased in the cotton of that memory. Every sound except the rain. For some reason, Reid can hear the rain tattering on the roof with crystal clarity.

In the rubble, Hotch's sleeve is motionless. His hair and head completely still. Reid is not surprised to see that Tobias Hankel stands above him, a shadowy specter, calm in the chaos. _There are seven members on your team, _he says, looking at Reid_. Choose one to die._

Reid swallows, a compulsive clench of his throat. _Kill me,_ he thinks, mouthing the words, like the whole ordeal is right in front of him again. He's back in that loop. Stuck in the repetition. _Kill_ _me._

Then he blinks.

Tobias fades to black, and all the current sounds catch up with him, loud and caustic, as if someone just changed the station on the radio.

"Put the weapon down," Rossi is saying. "This is over. Let him go."

"Over?" Hanks laughs, soft and normal sounding, and Reid feels his skin prickle. "Are you going to shoot me, Agent Rossi? I'd love for you to try. I'd love for you to see what happens if you do."

"Gregory," says Reid, but it's choked off as the arm tightens over his throat and he's yanked completely around to face Rossi, knee knocking into the stone edge of one of the coffins as he spins, Hotch suddenly gone from his view.

He whites out for moment, blinking to clarity with the sensation that he's lost time. The world looks whiter than it did before. Brighter. Rossi is standing closer than he was a moment ago. Standing out from the shadows of the still-standing shelves on that side of the building. Illuminated by the high bay lights above the mural. Hands gripped carefully around his aimed weapon. Eyes steadying from Reid to Hanks and back again.

The ghost of Tobias Hankel is back, standing just behind his shoulder, holding Reid's gaze, looking ethereal and angel-like. Like Raphael.

_There are six other members on your team._

_Choose one to die._

Reid opens his mouth and feels the tentative slide of air through his throat, Gregory's hard arm rough under his chin.

Morgan and Prentiss and JJ. They should be close. They should be coming. Reid thinks maybe that's what Hanks is hoping for. The team. All of them. Revenge for a perceived wrong. Restitution for ignoring him. Payment for what Gideon never gave him.

Hanks. Hankel. Tobias. Gregory.

Sin and consequence.

Checkmate.

Rossi shifts. A simple, steady step.

Hanks hauls Reid back farther in response, closer to the shelter of the coffins, putting the large mural across from them more fully in Reid's view. A testament of a hundred deaths. A gory allegory. Reid imagines the mouths moving, filled with silent screams. All of the faces tying knots in his brain until Hanks flexes a muscle and jars the blood trying to push to his head.

The wires lined down the painting look like bars on a cage, meant to hold them all in. Reid can't see where they end or where they begin and he can't fathom where the trigger might be to set their point in motion. Where's the ignition?

Rossi steps again. Reid barely gets a glance at the flicker in his eyes before a new sound registers and he's spun back in the other direction.

Prentiss is standing near the slope of broken shelves—soaked, like she's just walked through a river. And Hotch—Hotch is on his knees in the wreckage with his hands out to his sides, blood on his hair, holding Reid's gaze like he can read his mind. Reid breathes, expanding his ribs carefully within the momentary loosening of Gregory's grip.

"Agent Prentiss. So nice of you to join us," says Hanks. "But where is JJ?" He ducks his head closer to Reid's ear. "She's my favorite."

Prentiss starts forward, but is stopped by the debris of broken shelving and the suddenly altered aim of Hanks' gun. Going still, she lifts her weapon out to the side, drawing her arms apart slowly and deliberately, looking at Reid with a pointed expression, like she's trying to tell him something.

_Slow down_, Reid thinks. _We all need to slow down._

"What's the plan here, Gregory?" Hotch asks, still on his knees, voice commanding just the same. "Let us talk you out of the building? Then blow us all up? Burn us inside? What do you have? Pressure plates on the coffins? A tripwire somewhere?"

"Very good, Agent Hotchner. You're getting warmer."

Abruptly, the warped cry that drew Reid into the building in the first place, rises up from one of the coffins. Vibrations of it bleed through the carved stone box to his right—shockingly loud. Three boxes. Three women. Pawns. Sacrifices for the figment that is Jason Gideon. Real or not. Here or gone. Reid suddenly wonders if Gideon has never been more than that ghost. Intangible. Unsubstantial. Reid has spent his whole life seeking solid ground, instead he keeps walking through mirages.

Maybe Gregory Hanks believes that too.

As the cry dies out, a crush of empathetic claustrophobia tightens Reid's chest and he strains his chin down, holding his breath, groping his hands tighter around the arm trapping his neck. "Gregory," he repeats, shoving the word out. There is a constant vibrating in his throat, in his lungs and his vocal chords, shaking the edges of his vision, making him feel out of breath. Like something has halted the oxygenation of his blood.

"Think that gets you extra credit, Dr. Reid?" Hanks responds, voice culled in a whisper that penetrates Reid's mind in a way all of the shouting couldn't. "You using my name like you know me?"

Flattening fingers around the bend of Hanks' arm, trying to get himself air, Reid flicks his eyes right to left, Hotch to Rossi, Rossi to Hotch, and stumbles his words. "I do… I do know you. I know why you brought us here. I know what you want. If you let us take the girls out, I… I can help you get it."

The arm encasing him jerks inward, forcing Reid to lift his chin.

"And what is it you think I want, Special Agent _Doctor_ Reid?"

Swallowing with difficulty, Reid speaks. "You want what you've accomplished to be appreciated before he retires. You want him to realize what he missed out on. But it's too late—he's already retired. He never saw your painting. He never saw anything you did. He didn't come back to Colorado for you. He doesn't care."

There is a stiff pause. Reid feels the expansion of Gregory's chest against his back and a second later, the close press of the gun to his temple. "But you do, is that it? You understand?" The gun slips lower, digging into his cheek. "As touching as that is, Dr. Reid, there are only two things I want today. The first, is for Agent Gideon to _show himself!_" Hanks voice bellows loudly at the end. "The second… is for you to die."

Reid jerks and tries to turn his head, feeling the gun jab roughly into the pressure point below his ear. The world goes fuzzy, bends of light darting angrily in his vision.

"_Hanks!_" Hotch says sharply, voice washed with rust.

"You hurt him, and you will never get out of here alive," Gideon's voice rings out, stepping from behind the shelves near Rossi's flank, weapon aimed.

Reid flutters his eyes towards him, feeling his pulse speed up. The constant tremble of leaves in his ears rushes faster—pulse beating louder, darker, harder—a thousand conversations judder to the surface of his brain.

_I have been playing at this job in one way or another for almost 30 years. I've felt lost. I've felt great. __I have felt scared, sick, and insane__…_

"Jason Gideon," says Hanks, like an announcement for royalty. Reid can feel the smile against his ear, and it's jarring, how the tone feels familiar. Like Hanks is the one that's been seeing Gideon in his dreams. Like he's the one that slept in an office in front of a chess board, waiting for a game that would never happen.

_Jason Gideon. Jason Gideon. Jason Gideon._

It's not like Reid imagined it. Gideon doesn't look like he did with the glinting keys. He doesn't look easy, or casual. He looks dark, and transfixed, and like half of him is someone else entirely. But he also looks real and tired and angry. Flesh and blood familiar. Old and new, all at the same time.

_You are stronger than him_, Reid hears. _He cannot break you. _But it's not the Gideon in front of him who says it. This isn't the Gideon from Reid's memory. This isn't that man. Not anymore.

"You don't get it," Hanks says, and his voice is suddenly cut with calm and anticipation. "You, out of all of them. You were supposed to understand."

"What was I supposed to understand?" asks Gideon.

"The best artists, the most skilled—they're only appreciated after they're dead, Jason. It doesn't matter if I live or die. After today, I will be remembered forever."

"We will forget you tomorrow," Gideon returns steadily. "You've entered this game in the shadows, hiding behind images and aliases. You can't take responsibility for anything, you're not man enough. This was your master plan? Bring us here? Hold the kid in front of you? This is what, your third time trying to kill him?"

Hanks' arm pulls tightly against Reid's neck, gun jabbing harder. "I didn't care if he died or not the first time. It would have worked for me either way."

"Right," agrees Gideon, nodding. "Because you were already planning to abduct the girl from the hospital, kill whichever agent you'd poisoned at the same time, if they'd lived… but he wasn't there, was he? Not as smart as you think you are."

Hanks' chest expands into Reid's back, the tip of the gun wobbling with agitation. "No. _You._ You were the one that didn't figure it out. You were supposed to see what was going on. You should've understood. You—"

"You know what I think?" Gideon interrupts. "You didn't single out Agent Reid to poison, he's just the one that walked into the coffee shop, but you were glad it was him. True genius bother you that much? Show you too much of your own inadequacies?"

"No. _No_."

The gun wavers, allowing a sliver of space between Reid's skin and the barrel. Next to Gideon, Reid sees Rossi's eyes flicker, stance tensing. Reid hisses in a lungful of absurdly clean air and holds his breath.

"You want to know why you didn't get my attention?" Gideon continues. "It was shoddy work. All this—everything you've done. This master plan? It's wasting everyone's time."

"Reid, _down!_" Morgan's voice suddenly yells. A command from the sky. Reid lifts his feet off the floor, gripping Hanks' arm as he drags his weight down, going boneless. The shift drops him on his knees, cracking them against the cement. Two gunshots resonate. One loud and right behind Reid's ear, breaking over the whispering of leaves, cutting all other sound and leaving a high pitched ringing to fill the void. He rocks forward, palming the ground for balance, and a second later feels the floor shudder beneath his knees. A shockwave from something unknown, dust and grit shaking down on the back of his neck.

Forcefully, he gathers air into his lungs and coughs, looking up to see smoke running into the room from the direction of the mural—the middle of it crumpled inward to show a slice of the outside storm. There are no flames with the smoke, but it feels like there should have been. Smoke of an event cut short. Curtailed tragedy.

Sound cuts in again, and there are voices everywhere.

Reid drags his feet under him, palming the ground and stumbling upright, coughing in the thin smoke as a hand lands on his arm. Steady, stark, and purposeful. Hotch.

"Get him out," he hears Hotch say. Sees him turn his head. Morgan is with them, reaching for his shoulder. Prentiss is bending over one of the stone boxes. Policemen in flack jackets are filling the space with Rossi's voice giving slow-motion commands.

His pulse is slowing down.

He turns his head to look for JJ and Gideon's face comes into focus. His pulse speeds up again and his lungs begin to stutter. There is no more space in him for air. No more space in him for anything. The smokey light around him starts blinking in time with the hitch in his lungs. Faster and faster, until the flutter of them is all he sees. Suddenly he's on the ground again, feeling his limbs go numb as his body starts to seize.

Then memory disappears, and all is quiet.

* * *

tbc


	22. Chapter 22

Be prepared to find these last sections a tad maudlin, and maybe sort of… epilog-upon-epilog-ish. But because it sounds better and makes it seem like I actually know what I'm doing, let's call it the denouement and an epilog, and pretend that in this particular case, they are actually two different things. I divided this last chapter for LJ, so I'm dividing it here as well.

* * *

**Part 22**

* * *

The sterile air in the hospital trudges warily over the grime on the team's skin, ruffling the edge of Rossi's collar, rippling the soot stamped to Gideon's shirt.

Closing his mouth, Morgan slowly pulls a hitch of it through his nose and feels the recoil against the remainder of smoke in his lungs. Ten minutes of standing in the same spot hasn't eased the contrast. They are loam on white linen. They are like shrapnel fragments recovered from a tragedy and set to study in a sterile lab. The hospital corridor is too clean for the grunge they've carried back with them. Too cold for their exhaustion.

Too familiar.

The dark wood bench JJ'd been sitting on just over a day ago now holds an open space next to Prentiss, but Morgan can't bring himself to take it. Instead, he moves in silent intervals across the hallway, rubbing his thumb over the thin wire he'd left coiled around his finger during his quest to separate the row of Gregory's incendiary devices from their flashpoints.

The wire is a physical reminder that it'd worked. They'd minimized the explosion. It should have taken them all out. It should have set trees on fire for a hundred miles, no matter how hard it'd been raining. It should have turned the entire south side of the mountain into a crater.

He stops, flicking his thumb under the wire, using his other hand to twine it in the opposite direction, watching pressure lines appear and disappear on his skin.

They'd still left a graveyard behind them.

Through the trees behind the millhouse, in the rain and the darkness, they'd found the rest of the sepulchers. Handcrafted stone, row upon row. Stretched out through the woods. It would take time to get the final count. To figure out how many women have been killed through the years. To identify the remains. To figure out how far and wide he'd traveled to take them.

Three alive. Too many dead.

A ripple against his sleeve jars him from the memory. JJ paces past his left shoulder, fiddling with her necklace. Their eyes meet briefly but neither speaks, moving in their own paths until Rossi clears his throat. JJ sits next to Prentiss then, hand pinched to her eyebrow, and Morgan goes motionless in the middle of the hallway, watching.

Gideon is leaning against the wall to JJ's left, hands pressed to the brick behind his back, eyes distant—a million questions hanging quietly around him that no one seems willing to ask.

Nothing has changed.

Everything is different.

_That man was the best,_ Morgan remembers telling Rossi, _and in the end, he simply ran away. _It's what the BAU does to people. Morgan's known it from the beginning. He saw it the minute he'd come on board—saw it in Elle, though he hadn't wanted to. Saw it in himself sometimes too. Too many girls buried in bones and stone, with open eyes and accusations.

They'd all contemplated leaving, maybe a hundred times over. But Morgan had learned, of all the possible hells, walking away seemed the biggest hell of all. Looking at Gideon now, he's pretty sure he was right.

Suddenly, the double doors down past the waiting room click open, and Hotch is there, drawing thicker the hue of déjà vu in Morgan's mind. There are dark stitches stretching into Hotch's hairline and bruises spreading down towards his eye. His forehead is shaded like watermelon, but he looks steady on his feet. As solid as Morgan has ever seen him. Abruptly, Morgan feels fiercely grateful for Hotch and what he sacrificed to stay with them.

Hotch could have had a nine to five life. He could have someday run the FBI. If he'd left back then, when Gideon had—he could have done anything. There is no concrete proof of what might have happened to the rest of them, no sure idea where all of them would be. But standing here in this corridor, with all its uncertainty, somehow seems better than any alternative.

"How's the head?" asks Rossi, when Hotch gets close enough.

Hotch returns a neutral look. "Still attached to my shoulders. No word on Reid?"

"Not yet," answers Prentiss.

Folding his arms, Hotch takes a breath and says nothing, easing into the silent rhythm of their waiting.

"Hey," says Gideon, soft voice cracking the stillness a moment later. "How's Our Girl Friday?"

"Crap," says Prentiss. "She's going to kill us."

JJ looks at her, already digging out her cell phone. "I'll call."

"No." Prentiss gets to her feet, touching JJ's arm lightly. "That's okay. Stay. I'll do it." She smiles simply at Gideon, nods carefully at Morgan, and moves away.

Morgan remains stiff nearly a minute afterward, standing taunt with the too-cold air grating over his neck.

The intercom beeps, followed by an unintelligible voice that slides like needles through his nerves. Palming his forehead, he looks over to see Hotch watching him, eyes flicking towards the wire twined around his finger. Looking away, he swallows, peels loose his feet and follows Prentiss down the hall.

\

When Gideon had talked Adrian Bale out of the building in Boston, the detonation trigger for the bomb that would end up killing six FBI agents had been in Bale's pocket. If they'd searched him, they would have found it. No one would have died and the lines on Gideon's face might have become more distinguished than aged. More steady. Less haunted.

Gregory Hanks had sewn his detonator into the cuff of his sleeve. A pressure trigger, Morgan told them, that once depressed became a dead man's switch. A thumb loop in the sleeve of the shirt kept the cuff right in the palm of Gregory's hand, always in his control, pressuring the trigger between his palm and the gun the moment he'd held it to Reid's head.

It'd been there, under the surface. The whole time. Waiting for the pressure to release.

Hotch replays the scenario in his mind, rolling it back, then rolling it forward.

The bright light in the hospital hallway casts wavy reflections of the team's faces onto the stark floor. Hotch rubs thumb and forefinger lightly down his eyelids and blinks up from the below-the-surface image of Gideon's jaw to watch the real thing. The eyes that meet his are flesh and blood in a ghost. Carefully impartial. But the rest of the expression is one he knows.

Boston.

A scenario rolled back and forth with no way to change it.

But maybe that expression on Gideon's face had never softened after Boston the way Hotch believed it had. Maybe it'd always been there, from the beginning of time. Waiting for the pressure and release.

Restless on his feet, Hotch paces towards the window in the corner of the corridor, stilling himself in front of the glass panes, glancing through the open blinds to the media firestorm being kept outside the entrance. There are no statements being given. No names being shared. Details would leak sooner or later. They always did. And they would study him, this latest killer. His history. His pathology. His IQ. One way or another, Hanks would live on the way he'd known he would, even with his body stretched dead in a morgue, JJ's bullet in his ear.

Every failure has a domino effect, Hotch thinks. Every success, the same. Somewhere out there a budding psychopath is waiting to hear the story of Gregory Hanks. Waiting to follow in his footsteps.

"Hotch," he hears, and looks left. Gideon is holding a cup of coffee in the air.

After a moment, Hotch takes it, feeling the heat in his fingertips and the watermark of familiarity in his bones. A reflection of memory. Balance and counter-balance. Genius and dedication. This is how they used to be.

He takes a sip and looks back out the window, feeling the swell of senselessness in the dark. For everything they are able to put reason to, there are a thousand things that never fit.

Gideon leans a shoulder to the outside edge of the window's frame. Hotch can see the unspoken words in his demeanor. The sentences that can't be formed. Not profiling each other on the team has long since become code only for what they don't consistently call each other on. They spend their time tying their identities around each other, all the while sewing secrets into sleeve cuffs until they all forget what's hiding there.

"Reid will be fine," Gideon says steadily.

"He's strong," agrees Hotch, aware that they are taking about more than this seizure and more than this case.

The rain outside has become a drizzle. Specks of water on the dark glass streak lines through the echo of the long hallway at his back. He can see JJ leaning forward on the bench—Rossi pacing away with his own coffee in his hands. All of it behind the transparent image of Gideon's silhouette.

"Aaron," says Gideon. "You've always been what this team needs."

Hotch can't decide if it's justification or endorsement. Maybe it's neither. Setting his coffee on the windowsill with his hand still around it, he moves his head away from their reflections, seeking Gideon in profile, looking at reality. "You didn't have to leave the way you did," he says quietly, mild and without malice. "We would have understood."

Gideon shifts his weight, a miniscule fraction. "How could you?" he replies. "I didn't."

\

With her elbows on her knees, fingers pressed to her forehead, JJ feels hyper conscious of her scalp and skin. Dry static tingles under her hair. The sensation of the coffee she'd just swallowed sits warm on her teeth. The shockwave from firing her weapon has left a phantom imprint in her palms. It is the only conscious thought she's given to her actions. She didn't blink. She hasn't blinked in a long time.

Later, when she has time to think about more than what's in front of her, maybe she will. When she has time to think of Will, and Henry. Time to think beyond Reid. And Gideon. And the family in front of her.

"Agent Hotchner?"

Lifting her head, JJ sees the doctor walking towards them. She hadn't even heard the doors click—hyper sensitive to them all night, and she hadn't heard the doctor approach at all. Tucking hair behind her ear, she gets to her feet.

"Hotch," calls Rossi, looking down the hallway. Hotch turns, Gideon following.

Gathering them near the wall, the doctor speaks, eyebrows tense, but mouth easy. "He's stable. He's awake. And, he's okay. For the most part."

"For the most part?" asks Hotch.

The doctor sighs, but JJ feels it's more preparation than deflection. "The aftermath of lidocaine poisoning can be difficult to predict. Seizures this length of time after the initial dose aren't common, but neither is lidocaine toxicity. With what he's experienced and with the dose he ingested… his size… his weight. Any number of factors can individualize the effects. At this point I'm going to cautiously say that with rest, he should be completely fine."

JJ tilts her head when she sees Gideon shift like he wants to say something, but he never does.

Rossi trades a look with Hotch. "But," he prompts.

"But," concedes the doctor. "The additional seizure is concerning. We can release him tomorrow, but he shouldn't be alone for a few days, and he should do a follow up with his home physician. He's likely to experience some insomnia, possibly some continued memory impairment for the next week or so, but I'd be wary of any symptoms that persist beyond that time period—headaches, tingling in the extremities that doesn't abate, even ringing in the ears—if it persists, it could be a sign of something else."

JJ folds her arms, re-rolling the words through her mouth to find the good news in the midst. She feels like there should be more questions, more answers. Something more steadily final that would close this all out, but it's not quite there.

"Thank you," Hotch says. "Is there anything else we should know?"

The doctor shakes his head, easing the pinch in his eyebrows. "Just get him plenty of rest. Keep him hydrated. And in my opinion, he's too damn thin, but that about covers it."

Rossi runs fingers over the cut in his goatee as the doctor walks away. To JJ, his face looks too narrow, oddly tilted. The world is still bent off center through her eyes, like it has been all day, and maybe now it's catching up to her. She lets go of her necklace, sitting abruptly back down on the bench.

"JJ?" asks Hotch. "Are you alright?"

When she looks up, Rossi sets a hand on her shoulder, heavy, the weight of exhaustion in his grip. At this point, they are all together the walking dead. "I think Reid isn't the only one who could use a good meal, or some rest," Rossi says.

\

The ceiling in Reid's hospital room is patterned in tiled squares. Some white. Some hazy green. Alternating. The exact number you'd find on a chessboard.

Tipping his head against the wall at his back, he closes his eyes and imagines the pieces. _Knight to F-3_, he thinks. The opening move in the game between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fisher in 1956. Gideon had played through the moves with him once—one of their earliest meetings. _It's not just the intentions of your opponent that you need to look at, _he'd said._ It's what your opponent believes about yours_.

Reid has thought about that a lot in the last few years. Breaking down the moves on the board over and over again. All the while thinking that, in chess, the ultimate intention was always the same. The pathways differ. The results never change. Only who wins. And who loses.

He tilts his head forward and opens his eyes, scattering the chess pieces from his mind. Grey light, the color of graveyard stone, passes through the window, turning the eggs on his plate to dull yellow and the red jell-o cup to burnt mahogany. His eye isn't twitching anymore, and his teeth no longer taste like iron, but he can't find much appetite.

A cotton feeling is curling around the edge of his brain and the soft glow that's been haloing his vision every time he opens his eyes hasn't completely gone away. But he doesn't see Tobias in the corner. He doesn't hear music playing. The walls are pale blue, and he thinks maybe they'll stay that way.

Hotch, and Prentiss, and Morgan had all explained to him what happened, over and over and over again until it seemed it was starting to stick. It's not that he wasn't paying attention. It's that the sequence of events kept falling out of order. The millhouse still feels like a dream. Like snapshots spread beneath his eyes. Still frames of old photographs in somebody else's house. Captured moments, fluttering out of sequence through his mind.

When he sees Gideon standing in the doorway, it takes a full minute to realize he's not one of those pictures.

He's real.

He's always been real. More real than Reid's father sometimes, in what he represented.

Blinking slowly at the sight, Reid suddenly thinks it bothers him most that when Gideon left, he took the pictures of the people that he saved, but took no part of them. Gideon always said the pictures were like his family. He took the pictures. He left them behind. What did that make them?

When the still frame of Gideon-in-the-doorway tilts his head sideways, Reid blinks again and realizes he's been staring. "Hey," he says roughly.

"Hey yourself," answers Gideon, finally stepping through the threshold. "How're you feeling?"

"I'm okay," he lies, like he knows he's supposed to.

The silence runs awkwardly between them for a moment, until Reid rolls the tray with the food away and tries to sit higher. Gideon comes closer, standing in the dull burn of the bedside light. And there is more silence. Too much to say. No words to say it.

Reid curls his fingers in towards each other. "Did you find it?" he asks.

"What's that?" says Gideon.

"Your belief in happy endings."

Gideon goes abruptly still, motionless on his feet, a soft line of movement working below his jaw.

"I'm sorry," Reid says softly.

"Don't be." Gideon clears his throat. "It's not your fault." Smiling lightly, he steps forward, easing a hip against the bed. "What I have learned is that we are part of the happy endings we make. A big part of that is up to us. I… I failed in that regard. I left because I truly believed, at the time, that the only things I could bring those closest around me would be misery and pain. Far more than would be there because of my absence."

"Do you still believe that?"

"Most of the time. Yes."

The tick of a clock hums softly somewhere inside the room. The echo of metal wheels clacking over linoleum leaks towards them from far off down the hallway. Gideon closes his hand, then sets it on the bed near the line of Reid's IV. "Then again," he says, "if you hadn't seen me, you might have swallowed more of that coffee. So… maybe I'm starting to."

Reid swallows, thinking _knight to F-6_, and _pawn to C-4_. Thinking, every explanation reaches the same end. But his next breath comes easier, curling tight only when it reaches the pressure built below his sternum. "Did you ever go see Steven?"

It matters, and it doesn't matter. Maybe trying to find meaning in the midst of all this is like his mother scribbling Dylan in notebooks, trying to add significance to their lives. Giving reason to their actions. Breaking down the moves, trying to change the results, even though they all passed checkmate a long time ago.

"No… I always felt I couldn't visit Steven in person until I was able to give you the same," Gideon says matter-of-factly. He pauses, looking at the crest of the window, instead of Reid's face, but his voice is straightforward and calm, steady in the way Reid had always counted on it to be. "If I'd let myself talk to you before I left, Reid, I would have stayed. If I'd stayed, I would have…" At that moment, he looks back towards the door, the grey light dark on his eyes before he turns them back to Reid. "I'm sorry I frightened you. I'm sorry the explanation still isn't better."

Reid opens his mouth, treads a trembly breath and quotes, "We clearly do not derive our concepts from sensations and only sensations, which those concepts merely serve to copy, because we are already presupposing certain concepts that are not reducible to sensory data from the outset."

Gideon lifts an eyebrow.

"Kant," Reid explains. Philosophy. No right or wrong answers. "Just because we think something should make sense, doesn't mean it will."

Gideon almost smiles. Nodding his head, he breathes out slowly. "I guess I could just say I had a mental breakdown."

"I guess so," agrees Reid.

And that seems to be where the words run out. He feels settled. He feels unsettled. He still remembers the darkness of Gideon's cabin. Remembers thinking for just one moment, before he'd turned the lights on, that maybe he was going to find a body.

"I should let you get some rest," Gideon says, standing.

The gap under Reid's sternum stutters a moment, cold skin suddenly hypersensitive against his hospital gown.

"I'll be here when you wake up," Gideon assures, then waits a beat. "I'll see you again before you leave."

Reid pulls his lips together, and nods, but he's suddenly not sure it matters anymore. The walls remain pale blue. The lines around the room have settled into a solid, specific reality. When he thinks over their conversation, his memory doesn't fail him. He remembers every word. Odd, that he should recover that but still fear his own mind.

Gideon starts to turn.

"Jason?" Reid stops him. The name foreign in his mouth.

"Yes?"

He licks his lips. "They don't call it a mental breakdown anymore."

There's a scuffle to the left and Gideon turns his head. Morgan is standing in the doorway, shoulder leaned to the doorjamb. "It's called a Major Depressive Episode," he explains.

Moving his gaze between them, Gideon tips a closed smile to the right, laughing out through his nose. "So it is."

\

The space in the long hallway is dark and quiet. The light filtering from the adjacent window has set a surreal tone to the world, adding to it a penetrating feeling of sorrow, like Dante's descriptions of Limbo.

The bench Gideon sits on is worn and old. Long and dark. Out of place and right at home. He's been living a half-life for so long, the bench feels like an old friend. In the background, down the hall, he listens to the soft cadence of Morgan and Reid exchanging words, thinking how far away they feel, how indecipherable. Untouchable to him in so many ways.

Pulling his wallet from inside his jacket, Gideon flips it open. The crease is worn from the motion. From the times he's spent making it open and close. A thousand times. A million. He's lost count.

Two pictures sit inside. Reid. And Steven.

He has always been a collector of pictures. In his office, in his cabin, in notebooks—some tucked into drawers, some carried with him. Most of them he sees now only in dreams.

"You don't have to disappear again, you know."

Gideon looks up from the wallet to see Rossi standing at the curve in the corridor.

"It isn't my place anymore," Gideon answers. "Even before I left."

Pulling hands from his pockets, Rossi walks closer, taking residence on the other side of the bench with a sigh. "Playing the martyr? You had a gift, Jason. As good as we all were, it was one the rest of us could never replicate."

Gideon shakes his head. "We all had our specialties, didn't we? We were all gifted in our own way." They are not green anymore. They are not pioneers. But the war they've fought has few other veterans, few with whom to commiserate. Rossi understands things the rest of them don't.

"Had we this group back then, how much faster progress we would have made," Rossi admits, leaning back against the wall.

"Finest minds I've ever known," agrees Gideon.

Rossi doesn't say anything else, but Gideon feels the questions.

"I got tired of seeing the darkness everywhere… of being a part of it. Inviting into our homes, our heads. Never staying far enough ahead to truly stop it. I know you understand that."

Rossi nods. "But what we do, it helps us see the light too, Jason. I learned that from you. I'm reminded of it every day, through them. Because we understand the unsubs, we take on too much responsibility for what they do. We have to continually remind ourselves to separate our actions from theirs, but we still do what we can. We keep living. What other human response is there?"

Gideon watches Rossi's face for a moment, then looks away, closing the wallet with a nod, taking a breath in the silence. He understands what Rossi is saying. He even agrees with it. But on his call, Elle was shot. From his choices, Reid was nearly beaten to death. Hotch was suspended. Sarah was killed. And six agents—agents with friends and families—all blown to hell.

He has no more room to add to the list.

So he keeps Steven, to remind him of what he was trying to come back to. And Spencer, to remind him of where he left. Always a son being abandoned. It seems to him, the most common thing in the whole world. And the thought of it, the commonness of it, hurts, every time. It is the last hurt he does not want to let go of, or forget. He feels it every day in this in between place. He wants to feel the pain of it for the rest of his days.

Like it is the last pain he can tolerate. The last of his humanity.

* * *

tbc


	23. Epilog

Fair warning, I'm putting this one to bed with just a little... sap. (facepalm) Guh.

* * *

**Epilog**

* * *

The tarmac is patchy wet in places, drying in the cool evening breeze that's taken over. The storm that had raged through the night, now vanished, leaving a ubiquitous film of pale cloud cover and a sliver of wind that catches uncomfortably in Reid's collar.

Gideon is waiting outside his own vehicle as the team pulls go-bags from their government-issue SUV. Reid's is too heavy in his hand. Weighing the sensation, he drops it down on the asphalt, and stands, running fingers up to his forehead. His muscles feel like tangled thread, unspooling and catching with the smallest provocation. Reaching over, Morgan takes his messenger bag from him, slinging it onto his own shoulder. He nudges Ried's go-bag to the side with his toe, then claps him softly on the back, and nods in Gideon's direction.

Reid turns, feeling the air against his face, approaching Gideon slowly. Gideon looks different in the outside light. Older.

The wind dies down as he gets closer, matching his hesitation, leaving a stillness on his skin. Hotch walks behind him and, after a beat of silence, steps forward first. He shakes Gideon's hand firmly, the crease in his suit taking on a smoother line, easing the intensity in his shoulders. "Take care of yourself, Jason," he says seriously.

Reid rubs his thumb under his ear as Gideon nods, and Hotch steps back.

JJ slips forward next, following with a brief hug. Prentiss settles for a light grip to Gideon's arm and a compassionate smile. Morgan steps to Reid's left and like Hotch, shakes Gideon's hand, a long silence in the grip. Gideon dips his head and Morgan pats Reid's back again before moving after the others.

Reid finds himself standing alone. Rossi is somewhere distant in his peripheral and the fluttery beat of the plane's engine is whirling to life in background. Reid feels uncertainty in all of it. Then, Gideon steps forward, setting a hand on his shoulder, gripping it tight, then pulling him forward. His sweater is rough beneath Reid's chin. His grip solid. The contact is expected and not expected. It stops the motion in Reid's chest, grabbing at the weight of the last few weeks, the last few days. Drawing up the weight of years in a moment. Reid opens his mouth and feels his lungs surge in response. Closing it quickly, he swallows before he can breathe out anymore of what's in him. Gideon's hand is warm and stable on his neck, but it's the allure of a moment, not of a future. It's tangled in history. Comforting, but not closure.

He bends his chin down against the sweater, holding his breath until he feels the hitch die down and feels the balance from his own feet, steady from his own center. When it settles, he leans back, holding one hand tightly against Gideon's shirt before carefully letting go.

He doesn't want to be frightened anymore. And he doesn't want to be like Hanks, seeing illusions as truth, waiting for things that shouldn't be.

Opening his eyes to Gideon's face, Reid nods with a swallow and turns, reaching down for his go-bag, starting to walk away.

A few yards in he stops, looking back one last time. "Gideon," he says, surprised at the steadiness in his own voice. "You should go and see your son."

Gideon holds his gaze for a long moment before pressing his hands into his pockets. "Maybe I will."

\

Reid doesn't look back again. Watching him walk away, Gideon sees a different tilt to his shoulders than he remembers. He's taller. His steps less diffident. Movements less tentative. Not breaking stride, not stopping movement, even when Morgan takes the go-bag from his hand, and grips his elbow to usher him up the stairs of the plane.

From this angle, Gideon sees more clearly the evidence of all that must have changed since his departure. Stronger but more weighed down, Reid is a different man. Gideon doesn't see as much of himself in him as he used to. The parts about him that are still growing and learning are now covered with Hotch, and Morgan. Prentiss. JJ. David Rossi, and the million things Gideon hasn't been there for. A million things that had happened while he'd been here, alive in the gloaming, mere miles from a killer he hadn't wanted to see.

Breathing out, he pulls his hands from his pockets, a sudden stiffness in his joints. Looking over, he sees Rossi watching him, waiting. "Will they ever stop seeing it as a game?" asks Gideon.

"Who?"

"The unsubs."

"No," says Rossi. "I don't suppose they will." He steps closer, and with a grip to Gideon's shoulder, he lifts his own bag off the ground, and turns to follow after.

Pressed against the door of his vehicle, Gideon flips the pictures in his wallet open. Open. Closed. Open again.

He stands watch until the plane has taken off and is completely out of sight.

\

It's kind of amazing how fast everyone falls asleep.

Though it wasn't by choice, Reid's slept more than any of them the last few days, and his mind is now awake, and spinning. He's holding the picture Gideon had given him after his first round of nightmares, rolling it gingerly between his fingertips in the dim glow of the reading light, watching the glossy surface catch the shadows. It flashes darker in the shade of his left eye, lighter when angled towards his right. Plato had formed a theory about that emission of light, believing in the possibility that the light that allowed objects to be seen might have originated from the eye instead of some external source.

It didn't always seem so off the mark to Reid.

When dark inside, all you see is dark. When light… light.

Above him, the angles of motion bend in his peripheral and he tilts his chin up to see Hotch making his way towards him. The rough wrinkles in his demeanor are barely visible through the solidness of his steps. Reid draws his legs back, allowing Hotch to sit. He rolls the picture face down in his fingers, then tips his eyes up and waits.

Hotch leans forward, not hiding the appraisal in his look. "How are you doing?" he asks. Never a casual question, coming from Hotch.

Reid licks his lips, feeling the pulse of uncertainty below his jawbone. He sets the photo down beside his knee and loosens his mouth. Maybe Hotch is afraid he's going to have another seizure. Maybe he wants to know if this encounter is going to spark another round of cravings, or the want to forget. Maybe he's going to reprimand him for circumventing orders, or for putting his life in jeopardy, like he did after Owen Savage.

"Better," Reid finally answers, voice softer than he means it to be, like his lips formed the word before it was ready to emerge. His brain is still heavy, but quiet, no buzzing or tripping. No whispering.

Hotch's gaze hasn't faltered, but he nods, and the line of his mouth softens. "Reid," he says.

Reid swallows.

Hotch looks away briefly then holds steady. "I want you to know… you have us. I know it hurt you when Gideon left. I know you were still… struggling. You've handled things remarkably well, better than I expected, but if any of this…" he trails off, bending his head down towards his hands. "Maybe it's not enough… We make mistakes. We miss things. But you still have us."

The plane hums quietly. The scent of the coffee Morgan made earlier hangs in the air. The purple bruise on Hotch's head is nearly invisible in the dim angles of light. Reid sits numbly, watching his face, thinking suddenly of the time he'd told Gideon he'd never miss a plane again. Thinking of why. Trying to remember when it'd no longer been a question.

After a moment, Hotch breathes out, leaning forward to tap Reid's knee as he stands.

"Hotch," Reid says.

Hotch stops, waiting. Beyond him, Reid sees Morgan with his head phones on and JJ with a blanket pulled halfway over her face. Prentiss asleep with a book under her hand.

"It's enough." He swallows again, looking up to Hotch's eyes. "Thank you."

Hotch sets his hand over Reid's shoulder, gripping solidly for a small moment, before moving on to the last of the seats.

\

_The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn._

David Russell

* * *

**The End**


End file.
